Remain Nameless
by GilraenDernhelm
Summary: A new, extremely AU Arya/Jaime fic (I'm obsessed, I admit it) inspired by the Florence & the Machine song whose title it bears. The prologue: Jaime and Arya meet at the beginning of (A) Game of Thrones, when she is still a child. The story: they meet ten years later after the Targaryen conquest, when she isn't a child anymore. Spoilers for A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons
1. Chapter 1

Author note

The chronology described in this story, particularly the ten year gap between prologue and story, will not add up with the chronology of the books.

* * *

Prologue

The woods were dark and sighing, but fiery and alive with torches; and the voices of the search party as they called out:

'Arya!'

Jaime walked further and further away from them, calling them cretins under his breath. If they were all clustered together in the same place and shouting 'Arya' at the tops of their lungs without getting a response, then shouldn't they spread out slightly? Split up?

Ned bloody Stark. Jaime doubted he'd do well as Hand of the King if he couldn't even organise a search properly.

Nevertheless, the incompetence of it suited him. It meant that he would be alone if he found her. When he found her.

_What is it about the Starks_? he thought, _I would never have dreamed of murdering a child before this bloody trip, let alone two._

The thought of Cersei made him shrug.

_There's always a first time._

* * *

'You can come in now.'

Cersei's voice had been so soft after the hours of screaming, arguing and smashing wine glasses that Jaime had barely heard her. But he had known that she was calling him, because she was him and he was her, and when he had pushed open the door and entered the room, he had walked across the threshold into chaos. A broken inkwell had been drip-drip-dripping its contents onto the floor and turning the flagstones the colour of blood in the dark; furniture had been upended and broken and smashed; one of the windows had been cracked from where Robert had no doubt attempted to throw a chair through it; and His Grace Robert of the House Baratheon, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, had been passed out snoring, drunk, and exhausted on the carpet.

The trouble had started earlier that day, when the eldest Stark girl had come racing out of the woods, her cheeks and hair aflame, bearing the news that her sister's wolf had tried to rip Joff's arm off, and that the Crown prince was now lying incapacitated on a river bank, in grave danger of bleeding to death.

When a search party comprising fifty red cloaks, three Kingsguard and five maesters had returned to the inn less than an hour later; their precious, howling, shrieking cargo bearing nothing more serious than a wound that could have been sustained in an unusually boring mêlée, the story had become infinitely more embellished and dramatic; the brightly coloured threads of Joffrey's memory (imagination?) spinning a great tapestry: a haunting story of a lonely prince by a river trying to protect his lady love…from a skinny little girl of one-and-ten and some lowlife butcher's boy, who had beaten the prince about the head with clubs; disarmed him; thrown his sword into the river and commanded a great fearsome beast of a wolf to tear him limb from limb; only to disappear faint-heartedly into the woods and leave him there to die.

Jaime had stood biting his tongue for much of the tale (Renly Baratheon had had less success and had had to be led from the hall crying with laughter), and Jaime had watched Cersei with a combination of pity and love and disdain as she had sat there holding Joff's hand, believing every incredible word the boy said.

The girl was still missing – gone to drink blood in her lair, no doubt – and no sooner had Ned Stark led a large party of Stark and Lannister men into the woods to search for her that Cersei and Robert had begun to argue; and the real bloodbath had started.

Cersei and Robert had screamed at each other for hours; their argument carried out in voices that could no doubt be heard from Dorne to the Wall and continuing in the same tedious bloody vein for most of the night. Cersei had demanded that Arya be punished in the old manner by having her hand struck off; Robert had called her a mad, cruel bitch; Cersei had declared that she would accept nothing less; Robert had called her a mad, cruel bitch; and so it had continued on and on into the early hours of the morning; Cersei growing angrier, Robert growing drunker; and Jaime outside their chamber door; a small part of him agreeing that losing a hand was an excessive punishment for making a fool of Joffrey; the rest of him trying to stop himself from bursting into the room and sticking a sword in Robert's belly; particularly when the king began to throw things.

_If he lays a finger on her, I'll kill him; king or not. _

But Robert hadn't hit her, and Jaime hadn't killed him, and when Robert had finally passed out with the argument unresolved, Cersei had called Jaime in to the chaos; and they had both stood staring at the enormous blubbering mess on the floor; the fire lighting identical candles in their golden hair.

Jaime had smirked at her.

'Do you want me to carry him to bed?' he had asked.

Cersei's lip had curled in disgust.

'I'd prefer it if you carried me to bed,' she had replied.

She had undone the laces of her bed robe and stepped out of it, and he had carried her to bed and fucked her. And it had been as if the days and weeks and constant refusals had never happened; as if her green eyes had not coldly flashed 'no, not here' on the road north, and at Winterfell, and then again on the road south after that bloody incident with bloody Bran Stark. It had been as though Jaime hadn't hated her and loved her, hate and love both, for all that time; for her coldness and restraint and her violent green eyes and easy ability to be without him. Because her ability to be without him was a lie, and it always would be. They could not be apart. Sometimes she convinced him otherwise, as she had done for the past six weeks, but it was a lie, a lie, a lie; a lie that felt like the truth when it was happening, but a lie nonetheless; an impossibility.

'I cannot be without you,' Cersei had whispered, her fingers caressing his back as he fucked her, 'you are my other half, my other –'

She had cried out as his cock had hardened further inside her, and he had been overcome by a sudden, euphoric vision of Robert waking up, and seeing, and realising, and screaming as Jaime sent the life tearing out of him; and stood over him and watched him die before returning to Cersei and fucking her with Robert's blood still red and wet on his hands. He and Cersei could not be apart; pretending that they could be was a lie, and one that she would never have to tell again; not to him, not to anyone –

'I _want_ –' Cersei had moaned, clutching him, 'I want –'

They could not be apart; she could not bear it, as he could not; he had known that she was lying to him; he knew every time it happened despite the anger and the agony it caused him. She might sometimes pretend otherwise, but she wanted _him_; him and no one else.

'I want – '

_Me and no one else._

'– her _dead_,' Cersei had finished, arching her back as she found her release.

He came. He collapsed on top of her. He had breathed with her lungs and she with his lungs, and their hearts had beaten perfectly in time, and Robert had been alive on the carpet, not dead; but for a while, they could pretend that he was.

'Go out and find the Stark girl and _kill her_,' Cersei had gasped, whispering frantically in his ear as her chest had heaved against his, 'don't bring me her hand, bring me her head. Kill her for me, brother, sweet brother. Kill her for me.'

And he had wanted the Stark girl dead too, because what he wanted and what Cersei wanted would always be the same; _they_ would always be the same; even when she pretended otherwise; even when she lied to him; even when her eyes told him that they could be apart, and live.

* * *

So as he stood there in the dark wood, the rest of the party far behind him now, Jaime's blood rushed at the thought of Cersei's skin, and how familiar it had felt, and the relief and the rapture that had come from that familiarity. But there had also been pain and worry and panic; the pain of a woman who had almost lost her son; who had almost endured that hurt; that hurt that would also have been his hurt. Nobody could be allowed to do that to them; to threaten them with that. Least of all a daughter of Eddard Stark. Stark had already taken more than was his due, both from him and from Cersei, because Jaime and Cersei were the same; and there was nothing like blood for pain and revenge; the blood of a child for the blood of a child.

The woods were very dark. He had no torch, but he could see. The trees rose up around him like giants; speaking to each other in the language of the leaves; passing their words along on the wind. And a voice came to him on that wind, a very small voice; a high one; the voice of a child.

'You have to go,' the voice said, 'they'll kill you if you stay. You need to run. Leave!'

_Found her._

As he edged forward, the earth became damp beneath his feet. There must be a spring nearby, or a stream.

A stream. Arya Stark was on her haunches next to it, small and thin and loud; and next to her was a huge, pale shape trying to lick her face. The wolf. His hands strayed to his sword and dagger.

'Just _go!_' the girl insisted, shoving the wolf away from her, '_go_, stupid, do you want to die?'

The wolf whimpered. The girl's voice cracked. It was an audible sound; like a branch snapping in her throat; like a blade snapping during combat; like a chain breaking.

She leaned forward and put her arms around the wolf's neck; as though it were a person rather than an animal. The wolf whimpered again, and she whimpered with it. Then she shoved the beast away again. Hard. Brutal.

'Go,' she commanded, tears heavy in her throat, '_Go!_'

The wolf edged a few feet away from her, then turned again; as though unsure of what to do; as though leaving the girl were against nature.

And the girl was picking up a rock, heavy and jagged and cruel, and throwing it. The beast yelped in pain as the stone struck its muzzle, drawing blood, and the girl's face and body were turmoil and upheaval and contradiction in an unspoken language _go stay go stay go stay_.

'GO!' she shouted.

The wolf went. It loped off into the trees like a shadow and did not look back. And the girl sat where she was and cried; apartness heavy in her lungs and voice; her own strength, her own loneliness, choking her.

He watched her for a long time. The night grew darker around him. She brooded, and hugged her knees, and sniffled, and Jaime looked at her head and neck, remembering Cersei's words.

_Kill her for me, brother, sweet brother. Kill her for me._

Jaime walked slowly towards her. She looked up, and recognised him. Her gaze travelled from his face, to his hand on his sword, and back to his face again. The grief that seethed in her eyes became an angry glow, and he could tell that she knew why he was there. He saw her wanting to run, and her feet not letting her. Shock. Realisation. Inevitability.

She overcame them soon enough. She ran. He ran after her. And when he caught her, she screamed.

He expected her to scream for the wolf. A long time had passed, but the beast couldn't have gone far, and though she had struck it and hurt it, it would certainly return to protect her if she screamed loudly enough. She must have known that.

Instead, she screamed at him.

'You leave Nymeria _alone_!' she shouted, her tiny wrists twisting and her nails scratching as he restrained her with one hand and drew his sword, '_you leave her _alone!'

Both her wrists were caught in his left hand, her pulse was hysteria and frenzy beneath his fingers, and all the time she did not look at him, not even when he raised the point of the sword to her throat. She looked over her left shoulder, and over her right, and then tried to see around him, oblivious to the glowing steel danger at her throat – or uncaring.

_Seven hells. She cares more for the bloody wolf's life than she does for her own._

The world turned quiet after that.

Perhaps it was the realisation itself. Perhaps it was the courage and the anger in her voice. Or perhaps it was the freedom that she had given the beast without a thought for herself; the freedom that she refused to take back; that she would not take back; even in the face of her own death.

Whatever it was, it made him sheathe his sword; the sound like a needle on glass. And she stared at him for a moment, and ran.

_I should follow her._

He didn't.

He watched her small form flying away into the trees for a moment; agile as her wolf had been only minutes ago; what must have been only minutes ago; but which now felt like hours; and he scarcely had time to wonder what the fuck he was going to do when a sharp yell rang out of the darkness, and the sound of a body hitting earth. And swearing under his breath, he went after her.

She was lying on her side clutching her leg. The limb did not look broken, but her small, ugly face was screwed up in pain; her eyes delirious with it and glaring at him with an expression of profound disgust, and not a trace of fear.

'Do your fucking worst,' the little girl growled.

Her words should have seemed comical to him. Under any other circumstances, he would have laughed. But there was an anger in the way that she spat out the words: a viciousness that was not childlike, or affected. It was innate. Buried deep. Sleeping.

'I'm going to help you up,' he proposed, as though he hadn't just tried to slit her throat.

'Fine,' the girl replied, her tone showing a similar willingness to forget what had just transpired.

But no sooner had he pulled her to her feet that she was off again; trying her best to run away; her leg not allowing her to; and before she had gone ten feet Jaime had caught her again; slinging her over his shoulder and beginning the journey back to the inn while she screamed and struggled like a demon; her efforts valiant, but useless. Jaime let her yell for a while. Then she started to irritate him.

'If you don't stop that, I'm going to clout you around the head,' he threatened.

'Put me down!' she shouted.

'You can't walk.'

'I _can _walk!'

'Liar.'

'Murderer!'

'Is that your idea of an insult, little girl?'

'It's not an insult; you tried to kill Nymeria and you tried to kill me!'

'I most certainly did not.'

'Yes, you _did_, and when I tell my father about it, he'll have you killed!'

'I think you must have been dreaming, my lady.'

'I was _not _dreaming!'

'It's nothing to be ashamed of. Children often have nightmares in the woods.'

'It wasn't a stupid nightmare, and when I get my own sword back, I'll chop your stupid head off!'

_Seven hells_, Jaime thought when they eventually reached the inn after half an hour of bickering,_ she's absolutely fucking exhausting._

He found Robert awake and still arguing with Cersei (downstairs, this time), and as Jaime unceremoniously dumped the girl onto one of the common room chairs; ignoring her disgruntled yelp of protest and stepping away from her, Robert asked him why the fuck he had been out searching instead of remaining at his post.

Jaime straightened up.

'It was my royal sister's command, Your Grace,' he declared coldly; his face like stone as Cersei, her eyes like wildfire, asked him if there had been any sign of the beast during his search.

'None, Your Grace,' Jaime replied, 'it seems to have disappeared.'

The little girl stared at him; anger, disbelief and shock turning her eyes black, and Jaime looked firmly back at Robert as though waiting for another instruction, determined not to observe her.

The stern and condemnatory tones of a familiar, stick-up the arse voice rang out from the corridor behind him.

'What is the meaning of this? Why was my daughter not brought to me at once?'

'Ser Jaime took her straight in to the king, my lord –'

The common room door burst open, and Ned Stark stormed into the place like a hurricane; his angry glare shifting from Jaime to Cersei to Robert to the girl, as though deliberating on which one he should murder first.

_It must run in the family._

Ned Stark walked quickly to where his daughter sat, and took her in his arms.

'Are you alright?' he demanded; affection and fear heavy in his voice.

'I'm sorry,' she replied, embracing him with admirable composure, 'I'm sorry; things just –'

Stark kissed her forehead and held her close and looked emotionlessly at Jaime.

'Thank you,' he said.

Jaime snorted, and waited; waited for the child to open her mouth and accuse him.

The girl looked at him, and said nothing.

_Scared, probably. She must be scared I'll try it again._

Her eyes were the colour of rain and fog, and her voice was the texture of iron.

'Thank you, Ser Jaime,' she said flatly, 'I hope to repay your kindness someday.'

As Jaime excused himself and walked away, he almost laughed out loud at the child's blatant and pathetic attempt to be sinister.

_How does she plan on 'repaying my kindness someday?'_ he thought, _sending me an angry letter? Trying to stab me with a knitting needle?_

He put it out of his mind immediately; as he did with all insignificant things. For the time being, there was Cersei to worry about.

Cersei, and the things he did for love.


	2. Chapter 2

_10 years later, on the Narrow Sea_

* * *

The sea was quiet and calm as blue porcelain that morning; stretching out to a shimmering horizon that only seemed to grow more crimson as the sun peeped higher above the clouds. It was a welcome respite from the previous two days of storms, lashing rain and sitting trapped below deck drinking too much, but when Tyrion read the contents of the raven scroll, he was seized by a sudden fit of nausea and vomited over the side anyway. He did not know if this reaction stemmed from excessive drinking, or from what he had just read.

They had been in Braavos for the better part of a year; holed up in negotiations with the Iron Bank from sunup to sundown; and the constant process of listening to some verbose Braavosi rattle off a list of what were no doubt demands, listening to Arya as she interpreted the list of what were indeed demands, refusing every one of the demands and watching the verbose Braavosi's face as Arya _told_ him of the refusal of said demands, had been more exhausting than he could ever have imagined, and had required the consumption of more prodigious amounts of alcohol than ever before in the name of staying sane.

So it couldn't possibly be the wine. He only wished he could tell that to the crew-members who were hugging their sides, throwing their heads back and laughing their cretinous Braavosi heads off at the sight of him.

An abrupt scattering of both crew-members and laughter announced Arya's appearance on deck, and Tyrion almost began to laugh himself at the (admittedly foggy) memory of the sailors' initial and very different behaviour towards her on the day that they had first boarded the ship. Despite Tyrion and Arya's known status as diplomats from the Dragon King and Queen of Westeros who were to be afforded every courtesy, Lady Stark's arrival on board had been greeted with a great deal of whistling, catcalling and lewd comments in colloquial Braavosi that Tyrion had only understood because of the brothels that he had frequented during their stay. Arya, her face blank and her eyes burning, had tossed her long dark hair over her shoulder and had slowly approached the captain, who had performed a cursory examination of her breasts before asking her if she wanted to fuck.

'_Valar morghulis,_' Arya had replied, handing him an iron coin.

The colour had drained from the fool's face with satisfying rapidity.

'_Valar – valar dohaeris_,' he had responded in a trembling voice, before staring at his boots, saying his prayers and clearly expecting her to impale him on the nearest sharp object.

Arya had stepped away from the captain as though he mattered less than the dirt beneath her boots; they had gotten underway with a speed that Tyrion wouldn't have believed possible; the news had spread like wildfire that they had a Faceless Man on board; and both travellers had been given a wide berth after that by all but the bravest and the most stupid.

_Except, of course, when the dwarf decides to commit the shocking indiscretion of vomiting over the side without his pet horror-of-all-horrors holding his hand while he does it._

Arya, dressed for the day in sword, dagger and her habitual Kingsguard leathers, ignored the fleeing sailors completely and came to stand next to him with her back to the sea; taking in his condition with a withered eye. Tyrion glared at her. She might be a judgmental hag, but he could not deny that she was glorious: beautiful, utterly deadly and only one-and-twenty to boot. He'd been tempted to try fucking her once or twice, but he had no doubt that she'd kill him if he tried. She'd probably tell Dany too, for that matter, and then he'd be genuinely fucked.

The thought made him vomit again.

'The captain says we should reach King's Landing today, if the weather holds,' Arya remarked breezily.

Tyrion, still vomiting, said nothing.

'I told you you shouldn't have had the Arbour gold.'

'Do shut up, Lady Stark.'

'As my lord commands.'

Tyrion straightened up and wiped his mouth; craning his neck as he looked up at her.

'Any news?' Arya asked.

'A raven from King Aegon,' Tyrion told her.

'What does he want?' she asked calmly; her face darkening despite her tone.

Tyrion turned and threw the crumpled raven scroll into the sea; smiling with disproportionate satisfaction as he watched the waves swallow it up.

'He's too late,' Tyrion remarked, 'so it doesn't really matter. But His Grace asks us to stay in Braavos for another three months.'

'What reason did His Grace give?' Arya enquired, as serenely as though she didn't give a fourpenny fuck.

Tyrion shrugged.

'Something to do with winning over the Sea Lord as well as the Iron Bank.'

'Contemptible.'

'Annoying.'

'Don't be coy. You know perfectly well he only suggested it to keep you and Her Grace apart.'

Anger, impatience and truth boiled fiercely in the pit of Tyrion's stomach.

'There is _nothing _between me and Daenerys,' he seethed, 'not anymore. And I'd be obliged if you'd remember it.'

Arya rolled her eyes at him.

'When can we just _kill _the lying son of a bitch?' she ventured, 'even if it's merely for the sake of getting the two of you to stop moping?'

'Daenerys will not risk a regicide so early in their reign; even one that makes it look like he died in his sleep,' Tyrion replied, irritated by her tone, 'it will do nothing but restore the anarchy of the war years. The Targaryen dynasty must be adequately re-established before sweet King Aegon meets with a tragic accident.'

'Or Her Grace could spare herself a lot of time and trouble by telling every lord in the kingdoms the truth about him.'

'_She has no proof._ Unless your masters are willing to furnish us with the proof they say they have.'

'Dream on, Tyrion.'

'I rest my case. She can hardly accuse Aegon of being false, and then present 'he doesn't feel right' as proof. That wouldn't stand up at dinner, leave alone in court._'_

It was true that Daenerys had never had conclusive proof of Aegon's falseness; though she had known of it long before the Faceless Men had sent Arya to her at Meereen. An instinct, she had called it, a stirring of fire and blood with a loneliness about it that the knowledge of Aegon's existence had done nothing to assuage. Then one day, a traveller had arrived at the palace gates like a wraith from another world; presenting herself to the Unsullied on duty under the banner of the House of Black and White, and telling them, in impeccable High Valyrian, that she respectfully begged audience with '_Daenerys Jelmāzmo hen Targārio Lentrot'_.

Grey Worm had been more agitated than Tyrion had ever seen him and had raised stringent objections to the traveller's being allowed into so much as the palace gatehouse, let alone into the throne room. Ser Barristan had agreed with him, though with rather more composure; insisting that whatever this Faceless Man had to say for herself was not worth the risk of admitting such a person to Her Grace's presence. Tyrion had told both of them not to be ridiculous. If the Faceless Men had wanted to kill the queen, they certainly wouldn't have been so foolish as to send their man in through the front gate.

Daenerys had agreed with him:

'I am not afraid of men with many faces.'

_Then you're a fool, my love. I would never have thought._

But when the traveller had entered the throne room, she had only had one face, and a command of the Common Tongue that could not be taught; and Tyrion had stared at her for a long moment, before turning to Ser Barristan for confirmation of what he already knew.

A decade had passed since Arya Stark's disappearance. A girl had already been passed off as her once before; sent off to Roose Bolton to be tortured by his idiot son. Anyone with the right colouring might attempt it – the right colouring, and the right inducement. But this was more than just a matter of colouring. The traveller that stood before them had the Stark look; the jaw, the eyes, the innate, inimitable gravity of expression; and unless Lord Stark had been so foolish as to father another bastard after the silent hell his wife had given him for Jon Snow…unlikely…

Ser Barristan had stared straight back at Tyrion without saying a word; as pale and disturbed as a man who had seen a ghost.

'You are welcome to Meereen, my…lady,' Daenerys had greeted, unsure of the correct mode of address for speaking to Faceless Men.

_I should look it up._

'Thank you, Your Grace,' the traveller had replied, bowing.

'What business brings you to Meereen?' Daenerys had continued cautiously.

The traveller had fixed her eyes on the queen.

'My masters, the elders of the Faceless Men of Braavos,' the traveller had responded, her grey eyes hard and illegible, 'send the Dragon Queen a gift for her Queensguard; a sign of goodwill and support for her cause: the gift of she that was Arya of the House Stark.'

Daenerys had stared at her with all the politeness that her bewilderment would allow her.

'The Faceless Men have sent me – she that _was _Arya of the House Stark?' Dany had asked, the mere pronouncement of the word 'Stark' bringing a hint of angry colour to her cheek, 'who are you, then?'

'No one, Your Grace.'

* * *

Daenerys, Tyrion and Ser Barristan had deliberated overnight in the queen's solar. Dany had been reluctant, uncertain and utterly overwhelmed; a past that she had not lived, but that she felt acutely every day of her life, tracing circles of darkness in her violet eyes.

The girl's father had been the Usurper's greatest friend. How could she trust her?

Tyrion had smiled grimly at her constant, incurable insistence on trusting people, before pointing out that in himself and in Ser Barristan, she had in her service two people who could arguably be called the Usurper's chief protector and the son of the Usurper's chief ally.

'That's different,' Dany had insisted.

'Is it?' Tyrion had replied, 'how?'

Dany had pushed out her chair and had begun to pace before the window, signalling to them to remain in their seats when they rose with her. Her hair had been the colour of moonlight.

'I am not insensible of the honour afforded me by the support of the Faceless Men,' Dany had said, 'and I am certainly not eager to offend them, but I must confess that I fear for the girl. I fear that she is being used for some political advantage.'

'_Of course _she's being used for political advantage!' Tyrion had exclaimed, trying hard not to laugh, 'there is no organisation _more _political than the Faceless Men. They are not like the Night's Watch; insisting left, right and center that they take no part. It is impossible to charge millions of dragons over hundreds of years for murdering people without being political in some way. The very fact that the girl has been permitted to present herself under her true name – more or less – is proof that politics play some role, if not the only role, in their decision to send her here. And the support of the Faceless Men, well; let's just say that having one on the Queensguard is likely to make our enemies shit themselves. It will strike fear into their hearts and make them run for their lives.'

He had meant the expression to be a joke, but Ser Barristan had naturally insisted on taking him seriously:

'It will do nothing of the kind if the girl strikes a dagger into Her Grace's heart at the first opportunity,' the old knight had said.

'If they wanted her dead, she'd be dead already,' Tyrion had repeated in exasperation as Ser Barristan glared down his nose at him.

'You have not considered the consequences of your being wrong, Lord Tyrion.'

'I am hardly ever wrong.'

'Such modesty!'

'I am known for my modesty. It is proportionate to my height.'

'Be quiet, Tyrion!' Daenerys had interrupted.

'As Your Grace commands.'

Daenerys had taken her seat once again.

'It will certainly make a great quantity of people very uncomfortable,' she had said, 'and it will assure the loyalty of the North and the Vale when the time comes. Lady Arya's sister rules in both, does she not?'

'In the Stormlands too, before Aegon landed,' Tyrion had replied, 'and yes, she holds the Vale and the North, but that in no way guarantees us her support. Let us not forget that Lady Sansa is a she-wolf of note, and possesses a remarkable ability to make her husbands die in their sleep when she grows tired of them. The woman is – what's the word?'

'Unpredictable?'

'Very. It is wiser to assume nothing where she is concerned.'

Daenerys had fallen silent for a moment, clearly pondering if Lady Sansa was to be cherished or feared, before looking across the table at Ser Barristan; who had served both her father and the Usurper, and whom she trusted in spite of the fact.

Tyrion would have preferred her to have no trust altogether. But 'trust in spite of the fact'; her own peculiar kind of trust…it was the worst sort of trust that existed. Or perhaps it was the best.

'What is your opinion, Ser Barristan?' Dany had asked.

'She is a _woman,_ Your Grace,' Ser Barristan had promptly responded, 'and I like her not.'

Daenerys had smiled ironically; her face the very picture of delight.

'Do you fear distraction, Ser Barristan?'

'No, Your Grace. But I am only one man among many. A woman on the Queensguard will cause nothing but division, strife and mischief, both here and when we return to Westeros. Her present and future brothers will be distracted by her presence, and the lords of Westeros will not love you for such a break with tradition.'

'No,' Daenerys had smiled, 'but their wives might.'

When there had been nothing more to say on the subject, Ser Barristan had left them alone, and Dany had moved from her seat at the head of the council table to take the one next to Tyrion's. He had taken her hand almost automatically.

'I think I'll accept her,' Dany had said; winding her fingers through his, 'I would be foolish not to. And as you say; if she wanted to kill me, she would have done it by now.'

'You're right to accept her,' Tyrion had replied; his blood like wine in his veins, 'though it's likely to send your entire household into collective apoplexy.'

'They'll get used to it,' Dany had replied, 'people will get used to anything.'

'It's true.'

And he had thought of the night that Father had died; how heavy the crossbow had been in his hands and how lurid the smell of excrement in his nostrils; and the old man's eyes had been pale and unsettling, even in death; his fingers convulsing and grasping at the air just as Tysha's had when the silver had sung and weighed them down and turned her to iron and blood; though now she was only blood…

Dany's fingers had been cool on his face as she had kissed him and whispered to him to come back; and with her arms around him, and her heart so warm he could feel the heat of it on her lips, he had come back; as he always did; as she had always helped him to.

Daenerys had summoned the girl to her private chambers the next morning, and had spoken to her with an uncertain but regal blend of both kindness and severity while Tyrion and Ser Barristan had looked on; the former with interest, the latter with caution and disapproval.

'I will have no person in my service who answers to the name of 'No one," Dany had declared, 'if you are to remain with us, then you must bear your former name.'

It had taken the girl some time to understand what was being asked of her. When the realisation had finally dawned, her face had changed completely; settling into a strange expression that Tyrion had never seen on the face of any human being before: an enigmatic, almost undefinable mix of amusement, fear… and pity; the sort of pity that one felt for innocence, and childhood.

'My former name, Your Grace?' she had repeated.

'Yes,' Daenerys had insisted, her voice bearing the sweetness of liberator and mother both, of _Mhysa_, 'your name is Arya, of the House Stark.'

'I am no longer Arya of the House Stark, Your Grace.'

'Nevertheless, that is what you will be called, and that is who you will be. You will remember your name and you will remember who you are. Else I will not have you in my service.'

'This is a difficult command, Your Grace.'

Daenerys' nostrils had flared at that.

'You have not yet begun your duties and _already _you disobey me?' she had demanded, 'do the Faceless Men mean to _insult _me with your presence?'

'No, Your Grace,' the girl had replied, entirely unaffected by the queen's calculated outburst, 'my presence is a gesture of respect and fidelity.'

'Excellent. Then we agree.'

Fear had risen in the girl's eyes, then – but it hadn't been fear of Daenerys.

_Fear of her masters, perhaps? Fear of herself?_

Tyrion's eyes had fallen on the girl's hair, then. It was very long. Almost down to her waist. Exactly the way that her mother had worn it.

_It's a coincidence. Many women have long hair._

'We agree, Your Grace,' the girl had said eventually, and Tyrion's suspicions had been aroused once again.

_That was too easy. That was far too easy._

But Daenerys had accepted Arya into her service with no such reservations; the girl had been instructed to report to Ser Barristan for her duties and to the palace armourers for her white plate; her first watch over the queen had been quiet, unremarkable and entirely free of any of the mysterious deaths that most of the household had expected; but when Tyrion had seen Dany that night for their customary interview after supper, he had found her quiet, pale and crushed by the murder of a hope that she had never been conscious of having at all.

'The Aegon Targaryen in Westeros is no Targaryen at all,' Dany had murmured, her voice like ashes, 'the Faceless Men have proof, but claim that they cannot give it to me without "covering all the world in shadow."

'How do you know this?' Tyrion had asked.

'From Arya,' Dany had replied; her breathing fragile and broken, 'she told me the moment we were left alone.'

Tyrion had padded softly across the room to where she sat; trying not to show his surprise at her reaction.

'Dany, you have known of Aegon's falseness for years,' he had said, gently laying a hand on her shoulder, 'you have told me so, many times.'

'Yes,' Dany had murmured, 'of course I have.'

Tyrion had stood awkwardly for a moment, trying to think of something comforting to say.

'The Faceless men could be lying,' he had suggested unconvincingly.

Daenerys had looked at him, her eyes bright with tears.

'Do _you_ think they're lying?'

His silence had been all the reply that was needed.

* * *

The news of Aegon's falseness had been the inducement that Daenerys had needed to commence taking back what was hers; and in the months that had followed, she had devoted herself to the planning of two great conquests that at times seemed to have equal importance in her estimation: the conquest of Westeros, and the conquest of Arya Stark's namelessness. Tyrion had dedicated himself to the first and had steered well clear of the second; thinking it unnecessary, dangerous, absurd and doomed to fail.

_You can't save everyone, my love, _he had thought.

That certainly hadn't stopped Dany from trying.

Arya's initial reaction to the command that she reassume an identity that had been stringently trained out of her for almost a decade had led Dany to conclude that despite the fact that the girl had sworn to obey her, she could not (and would not, most likely) attempt to obey her sovereign's command without help. Daenerys had therefore begun to spend time that could very ill be spared in ceaselessly interrogating the girl about her life: her memories, her family, her experiences and her time with the Faceless Men.

These attempts at – was 'humanisation' the right word? – had been disastrous, and had at first been met with a stone wall of sullen staring, gracious evasion and constant repetitions of the phrase 'I'm afraid I don't remember, Your Grace.' Dany's desperation to get the girl to say something – anything – had soon transformed her questioning into deliberate, premeditated provocation, and it had not been very long before both women had grown to detest the very sight of each other; Daenerys' fervent attempts at incitement and Arya's equally-fervent refusals to abandon the serenity of namelessness bringing about a state of war that neither was willing to renounce for the sake of peace and quiet; and that soon bled out into further, almost nightly confrontations and pleas for reason between Tyrion and Daenerys in their part of the palace and Arya and Ser Barristan in theirs.

Tyrion would have preferred Daenerys to conduct experiments with less potential for causing headaches, or for aggravating a skilled assassin in their midst. But eventually, unbelievably, it had been an argument with Daenerys that had brought Arya Stark back.

_Well. When I say 'brought her back…'_

Tyrion remembered the day that it had happened. It had been unseasonably hot. Arya (suffocating in her armour) and Daenerys (suffocating in her tokar) had both been rather more miserable and impatient than usual; and the latter, in a final act of desperate but callous provocation, had decided to try calling Ned Stark a coward, a fool and a traitor to the girl's face. And anger had ripped the namelessness from Arya Stark like a blade drawing blood from a corpse.

The girl's wrath had been terrifying. It had been silent and trembling at first; before rising to a crescendo of grief and horror and memory; and her words, and all that they expressed, had seemed for the first time to belong to her; to the rage, to the hurt, and to the love of the person that she had once been and to the person that she had become; to the girl who had learned stillness, but could never unlearn wolf blood. She had shouted that her father had been an honourable man and a kind man; that he had never been a traitor, not on the day that he died, nor on the day that he had joined Robert in his rebellion to depose the Mad King. She had said that treason melted away in the wake of such a man, until only honour was left; that her father had joined the rebellion for honour and for love and for grief; that he had helped crush the Targaryens for the same reasons; and that he had lost his head for the same reasons too: for honour and for love and for grief.

Daenerys, who had spent months aggravating the girl, had at that point decided to take genuine offence at what had, after all, been the result of her own folly; and the two women had spent hours arguing passionately and senselessly about events and wars and battles that neither of them had witnessed in the first place.

_My brother was right and your aunt was wrong. My House was right and yours was wrong. My people were honourable; your people were traitors. Your father was evil and mine was blameless. _

_Is this what Westeros will be in the future? _Tyrion had thought as he had listened to them, _is this what we will return to? Ignorance fighting ignorance with cruelty and judgment; children teaching children what their parents have told them; North hating South, South hating North; both sides ensuring that no one will ever forget?_

But as Arya and Daenerys had shouted at each other; their cheeks turning red and their voices growing tired from their efforts; a change had taken place. Daenerys had noticed first, and Arya soon afterwards, that somewhere in the midst of the inherited hatred that had burned like wildfire in their words and in their eyes; they had ceased to be the Dragon Queen and her servant who was No one. They had become Daenerys Targaryen and Arya Stark; shedding their masks and speaking as their true, unhidden selves.

Daenerys was accustomed to the transition. It happened each time she shed her tokar, or unwound the braids from her hair.

Arya was not accustomed to it. It had not happened since her childhood.

Their eyes had met. Grey and violet, ice and fire, both of them equally scalding.

'Who are you?' Daenerys had asked.

'I am Arya, of the House Stark,' the girl had spat out; her eyes like her father's and her face pale and frightened; and for the first time since the day that they had met, Daenerys had truly believed her.

Dany had called it a victory for weeks afterwards. Tyrion had deemed that too optimistic a term. He had known precious little about the Faceless Men at the time, but he _had _known that their training was permanent. It could not be reversed, and it could not be forgotten; and he did not believe that Daenerys had completely achieved either of those things. True, the girl _had _seemed more…_alive_ after that afternoon; more…human…in face and voice and movement and form… less like a ghost and more like a girl…but in essentials, she had hardly charged at all; remaining as composed and tranquil as the day that she had come among them. The only truly significant change in her disposition had been a change in the_ nature_ of that tranquillity. It had become pleasant rather than disturbing. Characteristic. Normal.

And there was her anger, of course. On the rare occasions that _that_ surfaced; it was sufficient to frighten entire armies into submission.

'Who's to say she hasn't just… _invented_ a personality to get you to leave her alone?' Tyrion had ventured one night.

'I _know_ that she's come back,' Dany had stubbornly insisted, 'I know it.'

'I don't trust her.'

'That's not saying much, Tyrion. You don't trust anyone.'

'I trust_ you_.'

'Can I have that in writing?'

Tyrion had stared at her for a long moment, and had felt a light inside him go out; falling down, down, down into the night and the dark to be submerged and drowned, without a struggle and without protest. Because in that moment, Dany had given him the means by which they would take back the Seven Kingdoms.

She had also given him the way that she would fade from him.

_Trust embodied in writing. Trust for convenience, and for conquest. Trust for necessity. And words. Words with nothing behind them, but words that will shape the world._

Not long afterwards, they had left for Westeros with a plan; a plan that Tyrion had hated and despised even though he had thought of it himself; and as their armies had unfurled Targaryen banners across land and sea while the colossal wings of the dragons spread out across the skies, _the plan_ – brilliant, efficient and cruel – had lodged like a sheet of glass between him and Dany, pulling them apart each time they looked at each other. And for almost every second of that entire thrice-damned voyage, Tyrion had tried to think of another way; knowing all the while that another way didn't exist.

They had found Aegon-who-was-no-Targaryen fighting a war in the Stormlands, which he had conquered soon after his landing, but which were now so overrun with rebel Storm lords, Baratheon sympathisers and the ever-present Lannister armies that the myriad distractions and entertainment to be found there could very well last for years. Nevertheless, he had graciously agreed to stop fighting for a few hours to meet them (of course he had), and when the true queen had met the false king in a pavilion beneath the walls of Storm's End, Daenerys and Aegon had sat examining each other without words for what had felt like an eternity; their faces blank and expressionless, revealing nothing. Their eyes had travelled in steady circles about each other's faces; moving from similarity to similarity, but showing no sign of being moved by them, and when Aegon's gaze had shifted for the tiniest particle of a second to where Arya had stood silent at Daenerys' shoulder; Tyrion had not known if he should rejoice, or curse.

_Ser Barristan said she would be a distraction._

'Why not leave this all behind and simply march on the capital?' Daenerys had somewhat coolly enquired, 'you could rot away in the Stormlands for years if you're not careful.'

'I have conquered these lands and I will hold them,' Aegon had replied, the stubbornness in his voice like steel, 'if I cannot hold them, then I will never hold King's Landing.'

Daenerys had smiled at Aegon, then. Rather sweetly, in fact, and for a moment, Tyrion had thought that she believed in him.

But her proposal of marriage, when it came, had been regal and cold; just as Tyrion had told her that it should be; just the opposite of what she had screamed that it would be when she had thrown him out of her solar on the night he had first suggested it.

_'If you can ask this of me then perhaps I _should _be marrying Aegon instead of you!'_

She had slammed the door in his face and had refused to speak to him for three days.

Aegon had sat perfectly still as Daenerys made her case; watching as her eyes glittered, and her hands moved, and her voice rose and fell as she spoke to him of marrying and of joining their two armies; of reuniting Westeros under the Targaryen banner; of restoring it to the rule of the dragons; of taking back what had been stolen from them by the Usurper and his dogs.

Aegon had pretended to be unimpressed, and Tyrion had wanted to kill him for it.

_A pity. I used to be rather fond of him._

'What do you _want_, Daenerys?' Aegon had asked at the close of her discourse; his eyes sharp, intelligent, bright, and cautious.

Dany had smiled disarmingly at the familiarity of address before sitting back in her chair, calling for wine, and dismissing it as Dornish swill when it came. Tyrion had taught her about wine. He had been concerned for her tongue before it had even occurred to him to taste it himself.

'I want the Golden Company,' Dany had replied, 'numbers favour my own army. Skill favours yours. You have fine men, but you do not have enough of them. I can provide the numbers you lack.'

'You have dragons,' Aegon had smirked.

'I do not intend to rule over a kingdom of ashes,' Daenerys had smirked back.

'You may take Westeros without reducing it to ashes. Parading the dragons before the gates of every city you come to should prove more effective at inducing surrender than a year's worth of negotiations.'

'I would prefer not to take that chance. Somehow, somewhere, there is always some idiot trying to be a hero.'

'I hope that heroism will regain your better opinion someday.'

'And we were getting along so well.'

Aegon had looked at Dany for a long moment, trusting her as little as she trusted him. _Comely, and closer to her age, and tall._

'What if I refuse?' he had asked.

Daenerys had smiled at him.

'You won't, though, will you?'

Aegon had pretended to think about it; even going so far as to ask for time to consult his advisors. They had 'consulted' for an entire week. But in the end, he had accepted, as any sane man would have done, and when a septon had been summoned to perform the marriage, Tyrion had felt curiously empty; his own cleverness failing to provide the comfort that it usually did.

_The scheme is a good one. Marry him. Use his men. Win the throne. Kill him. It's very simple._

_So why does it feel so fucking complicated?_

* * *

The ship gave a lurch; making Tyrion's stomach churn and his head swim in protest. They had traded positions now; Arya facing the sea and Tyrion standing with his back to it, as though looking back towards Braavos and away from Westeros would stop him from remembering the conquest and what they had done; what he had done. But he did remember.

When the battles had begun, and Daenerys and Aegon had been spending most of their time arguing about when to deploy the dragons and why; the command of Tommen's armies had fallen to Tyrion's brother Jaime; and he had given them hell until the bitter end. The long, miserable bloodbath of a siege at King's Landing, in which dragon warfare had only been employed on the final day, had been the first instance of it; and had gained the dragon armies nothing but the knowledge that Tommen and Cersei were not in the capital at all; and that the end of the war had somehow become its true beginning. Jaime, the gods only knew how, had managed to move Tommen and Cersei to Casterly Rock without a single spy or little bird having the slightest notion of what he had done; and when the dragon armies had finally arrived at the Rock, Jaime's men had fought like fucking demons; like the stuff that songs should be made of.

But it hadn't mattered, of course. Aegon had deployed all three dragons despite Daenerys' pleas for reason; thousands of men had been burned alive; and when the keep had finally been breached, the conquerors had found both Tommen and Cersei dead in the Golden Gallery; a vial of poison clutched in the latter's hand.

_My sweet fucking bitch of a sister_, Tyrion thought,_ she probably called it mercy._

He still ground his teeth at the thought that he hadn't been able to kill her himself. He still wept at the thought that they hadn't been able to save Tommen. And he still felt madness stirring in his mind at the memory of Jaime screaming through the thirty days and nights of torture it had taken to make him swear allegiance. Tyrion had stood outside that fucking door for almost all of that time, listening in horror to the constant, interminable insistence that Jaime swear, and the constant, painfully typical response of 'Fuck yourself, you fucking dragon spawn.' Every day, he had demanded to speak to Jaime, and every day he had been refused, and by the time two weeks had passed, he had started to pray that they would simply put Jaime out of his misery and kill him; knowing all the while that they wouldn't. Living lions were infinitely more useful than dead ones, even if they were maimed.

'Let me see him and you'll have your fucking allegiance,' Tyrion had said, '_just let me talk to him for five minutes_.'

But no matter how much he had insisted, demanded, or begged, Daenerys and Aegon had unfailingly, unflinchingly refused him; the former out of compassion, the latter out of spite.

Aegon had known by then, of course; of the unholy liaison between his wife and the deformed, depraved demon monkey. Tyrion might even have felt ashamed of himself had he thought for one second that Aegon really loved her.

All the same, Tyrion had been surprised at the speed with which he had been packed off to Braavos with Arya to commence the business of kissing the Iron Bank's arse. Linguists, Aegon had called the pair of them; one speaking the language of money, the other speaking the language and culture of the hundred islands. Together they could not possibly fail to convince the Iron Bank that no matter what Cersei had told them, and no matter how many times she had done so, the Targaryens would see to it that the Braavosi got their gold back. They just couldn't do so immediately.

It was that precise issue that had taken a year to resolve.

Tyrion had hated every moment of that year in Braavos. The blistering heat; the stink of the waterways after the rain; the cold beauty of the courtesans and the subsequent re-emergence of his old habits; the quality of the wine; the unaccountable aggression and humourlessness of every banker and stock broker they dealt with; the constant smell of fish; the harshness of the language; and all the problems that inevitably emerged from being clustered together at all hours of the day and night with a beautiful girl that he couldn't stop himself from wanting to fuck. And all the while Daenerys was in his mind; the memory of her, the touch of her, the smell of her hair, the sound of her voice at night…

_And now that I'll finally see her again, I'm afraid_, Tyrion thought, shuddering as the gulls shrieked overhead, _I'm staring back towards Braavos and wishing we were going there instead. _

There was a shout from the crow's nest and a tensing-up beside him, and Arya was tugging urgently on the sleeve of his jerkin; a little harder than was necessary.

'Tyrion,' she said, 'we've arrived.'

He turned to face the sea. It was still the colour of blue porcelain. But far away in the distance was a castle above a sea of fog; and its towers were as red as blood.


	3. Chapter 3

For reasons both of practicality and of vanity, Jaime Lannister had developed a near-incurable aversion to mirrors since the day that he had sworn allegiance to the Targaryens. Looking into them reminded him that he had failed; not just himself and his family, but Westeros, and its uncounted multitudes of living and dead. Battle and torture and grief had stripped the gold from his hair, turning it almost entirely silver, and his skin had become a tapestry of scars; old and new, silver and red. His torso and back were by far the worst, and were easily hidden; and the Westerlanders that he worked with every day were far too accustomed to him to give the thin, fragile scars that marked his cheeks and forehead so much as a passing glance. But on the rare occasions that he chose (or was obliged to) appear in the capital, people stared openly at him, and every pair of eyes became a mirror.

For the past week, Queen Daenerys had had most of the court in uproar preparing for the feast that would welcome Jaime's brother Tyrion and the Lady Arya Stark back to Westeros. Jaime hadn't come for the feast itself; indeed he could ill afford to leave Casterly Rock at all under the circumstances, but he was eager to see Tyrion, and to witness first-hand the peace that millions of people had died for.

On the night of the feast, however, he found the great hall packed with lords and ladies from both the Northern and Southron nobilities; all of whom seemed ready to leap across the tables and kill each other at a moment's notice. Lords walked about with their hands on their swords and ladies with daggers in their eyes; two minor scuffles involving squires, young knights and lordlings had already broken out and had been rapidly crushed; and King Aegon and Queen Daenerys, artfully oblivious to the fact, moved easily and elegantly like a single corona of silver light from one end of the hall to the other; taking care to favour each side equally with their presence.

It amused Jaime immensely that he (and everyone else, apparently) still thought in terms of 'sides.'

_We are meant to be one realm, after all,_ he thought,_ North and South united once again under the munificence of the Dragon Dynasty, just as it was always meant to be; peace and prosperity, understanding and tolerance._

The little understanding or tolerance that remained in the hall was soon dispelled by the arrival of Lady Sansa Baratheon and her retainers; all of whom were dressed in sober Northern grey and wore no jewellery or accoutrements of any kind. Half the courtiers bowed, the other half hissed and spat, and Jaime found his lip curling in disgust as Lady Sansa smiled widely; bowed right and left; acknowledged her friends; ignored her enemies; and came to a graceful stop beside him, as though they were old friends.

'Ser Jaime, how delightful to see you,' she purred, curtseying deeply.

'I wish I could say the feeling was mutual,' Jaime replied, not returning the courtesy.

The lady smirked at him, and looked him up and down.

'You probably don't remember the last time I saw you,' she ventured.

'You're right,' Jaime scoffed, 'I don't.'

'At the siege of Casterly Rock,' she reminded him.

'Ah,' he sneered, 'did you see me _before_ you convinced King Aegon to burn most of it to the ground, or _after_ he miraculously decided to burn Lannisport too? I've always thought it an odd way of expressing his displeasure that you had disobeyed his orders and sacked the place.'

Lady Sansa gave a ladylike shrug, and Jaime could not help but stare at her in disbelief. He had never in his life met a woman so unmoved by casual cruelty, or so naturally inclined to it. Apart from Cersei, of course.

_May she dance on coals in hell._

'I cannot bring myself to regret the fate of Lannisport, Ser Jaime,' Lady Sansa said coolly, 'much must be sacrificed in war so that goodness might prevail. I'm sure a seasoned captain like yourself is capable of understanding that.'

'I am,' Jaime acknowledged bitterly, 'I'm only curious as to what I should be the most curious about: why King Aegon felt the need to deploy all three dragons when one would have sufficed, or why he unquestionably obeyed every word that came oozing out of your mouth.'

Lady Sansa's face darkened briefly, then reassumed its habitual insincerity.

'I cannot claim to possess the influence that you suggest,' she remarked, a hint of iron in her voice, 'the king has his own mind, and it is a fine one. But Queen Daenerys was in a merciful mood on that particular day, and her mercy tends to be contagious. Mercy is not a constructive tendency in a conqueror. Aegon needed to be reminded of that – that, and the fact that it is _he _who rules in Westeros, by right and birth and blood.'

'Hm,' Jaime replied, his voice dripping with innuendo, 'I'm sure that 'Aegon' was only too delighted to be reminded of the fact.'

Lady Sansa gave a charming impression of appearing confused.

'Come now,' Jaime snorted in response, 'you can't say that I'm the first to mention it. And it's your own fault entirely. If you had yielded Winterfell and the Vale with anything resembling a fight, the rumours might have been very different.'

'Many things might have been different,' she murmured ominously, before looking out across the hall at the friction that seemed to stretch taunt over the proceedings; threatening to snap and shower them all in a blaze of fresh blood and mangled flesh.

'Look at you all,' Lady Sansa said in a low, disgusted voice, 'the South. Your opulence and your finery and your pretence. Do you wonder that one look at all of this is sufficient to make me and my men want to murder the lot of you all over again?'

Jaime ignored the question, and said nothing.

'I had not heard that you planned to attend court at all this year,' Lady Sansa continued.

'I hadn't,' Jaime replied, 'but I have come to see my brother Tyrion.'

'Still at odds over that whore he married?' she enquired pleasantly; her face twisting into a spiteful smile.

Jaime once again chose to ignore her. Lady Sansa once again pretended not to notice.

'I myself have come to see my little sister,' she told him, 'I saw very little of her during the conquest, and what I did see was not very promising. I don't know how she does it; standing dutifully outside Daenerys and Aegon's door at all hours of the day and night pretending that the prospect of being a glorified sentry for the rest of her life is a tremendous honour for her. You must be so pleased to be rid of such nonsense.'

'Not half as pleased as you seem to be with widowhood,' Jaime countered, 'it agrees with you.'

'You are cruel, Ser,' Lady Sansa sighed, 'but then the gods were also cruel in their choice of both my husbands,'

'To you?' Jaime asked, 'or to them?'

The lady smiled grimly.

'Harrold was amusing for a while, and not quite a loss in bed,' she observed, 'but he had mutton between his ears. Stannis, on the other hand, had too much between his ears and almost nothing between his legs. He was a dreadful bore.'

'I can't argue with that,' Jaime conceded, 'but you must agree that his death was both sudden and unfortunate. Had he lived, you might have been the queen of Westeros by now.'

'Why would I want to be the queen of Westeros, Ser Jaime?' Lady Sansa ventured, speaking as she would to a stupid child, 'I am already the queen of half of Westeros. The better half, thanks to my lord husbands.'

'And which one of your late lord husbands does your son favour?' Jaime asked, 'Harrold, Stannis…or Lord Baelish?'

'I pray to the gods every morning and night to bless the memory of my late lord husbands,' Lady Sansa professed, her tone suggesting that she did no such thing, 'I will pray that they bless Lady Brienne's too, since we are speaking of the deficient deceased. How long is it now since the Brotherhood Without Banners decided that her head was too ugly for her body?'

'Eight years,' Jaime replied forcefully, hating her.

'And you've never thought of marrying?' Lady Sansa grinned, knowing it.

Jaime paused for a moment, unable to speak. The bile in his throat would not let him.

'I cannot marry,' he said in a low, determined voice.

Lady Sansa smirked at him.

'Come, come, Ser Jaime, you were thrown out of the Kingsguard the moment you refused to bend your stubborn Lannister knees to the dragons,' she tittered, 'such devotion to an order to which you no longer belong makes you seem far more sentimental than is helpful; and after Lady Brienne, well. Anything in the world must seem thrilling in comparison.'

Jaime folded his arms with a mix of amazement, resentment and the desire to slit her stiff Stark throat.

'You show surprisingly little respect, Lady Sansa,' he stated, 'for the memory of a woman who devoted her life to fulfilling the oath she made to find you.'

'But she didn't find me,' Lady Sansa declared bitterly, 'she didn't find me and she didn't save me. The only _saving_ of me that took place was done _by me_, and by no one else. My own freedom was waiting for me, and I took it, regardless of any _oaths_ that I had sworn. You should do the same thing, Ser Jaime, before you become a bitter old man drowning in your own piss.'

'I swore an oath and I will not break it,' Jaime quietly declared, 'not even if the King and Queen have given me permission to.'

Lady Sansa smirked mockingly at him.

'We both know that their 'permission' means as little to you as the allegiance you swore them. But I imagine that lying comes naturally to you. You are a Lannister, and a Southerner. Neither recommends you in terms of honesty, or honour.'

'Explain to me how being a Northerner, and a daughter of Eddard Stark, qualifies you to lecture me on either.'

'Careful, Ser.'

Jaime almost spat at her feet.

'I have spent the past year,' he growled, 'attempting to rebuild a city that your precious Aegon burned to the ground for no better reason than proving to the world that he was a Targaryen…and because he wanted to get his cock inside _you_, of course. A year has passed since the siege, and we still haven't shifted all the ash. We go slowly, a little at a time, quarter by quarter, house by house. Every day we find the corpses of men, women and children huddled together in their homes, hugging, reduced to nothing but ash. They disintegrate when you touch them. They become piles of ash on the floor. My men threw up the first few times it happened. They told me that they couldn't bear it; that they'd sooner die than bear it. Now they work all day without stopping, and at the end of each day, they walk home covered in the ashes of what used to be human beings, entirely unaffected; as though such a violation of life and decency were the most ordinary thing in the world. So don't you fucking tell me to be careful, _my lady_. Because being careful is the only thing that stops me from killing you where you stand.'

Lady Sansa had not backed up an inch. Her face was twisted into a grimace of bitterness and cold amusement, but no fear; and Jaime stormed away from her and ripped aside one of the balcony curtains that lined the hall; almost gasping aloud at the coolness of the night air on his face; almost growling aloud at the fact that he had chosen the wrong place to be alone.

Lady Sansa's sister was sitting on the balustrade in front of him. She was wearing white Kingsguard leathers, and drinking a flagon of wine.

* * *

_Seven hells, is there no escaping the fucking Starks tonight?_

He was about to turn on his heel and storm back into the hall, knowing full well how foolish it would make him look. But the girl that he had once tried to kill was slowly lowering the flagon of wine and looking at him, and he was gripped, suddenly and immediately, by the curious feeling that he was being stripped to the bone and examined. It was both off-putting and oddly pleasant, and he felt his anger fading to quiet fascination.

She was tall for a woman, and slender, and her face resembled her father's. She sat easily and elegantly on the narrow balustrade; her right heel resting lazily on her left knee; and the sword and dagger at her waist seemed as much a part of her body as her skin and her blood. Her eyes were beautiful, but empty; her gaze intense, but blank; and as Jaime remembered the scrawny, fiery child that had fought and run and scratched and threatened to chop his head off, he saw no trace of her. She looked utterly emotionless and unmoved, but something prevented him from concluding that her look made her so. He already knew the answer to the question, but he could not stop himself from asking it:

_What has happened to her?_

'May I sit?' he asked.

'No,' she replied.

He approached her anyway.

Lady Arya's eyes met Jaime's, sharply, as he walked slowly and deliberately towards her; a challenge in every stride. Her head turned slowly, like the head of a hunter as her scrutiny followed him; and by the time he had reached her side and seated himself; the piercing, calculating analytic of her initial gaze had widened, and intensified with something that would have resembled hatred had her face been marked by anything that one could call emotion.

Jaime laughed mockingly at her.

'Oh, for fuck's sake,' he drawled, 'you're not still annoyed about your bloody wolf are you?'

Lady Arya glared at him, but did not reply.

'_Oh_,' he continued, with equal sarcasm, 'is it because I tried to kill you?'

'Forgotten about my brother, have you?' she questioned.

Jaime rolled his eyes at her.

'Don't be so bloody sensitive. It was _ten years ago_.'

'I'm not being _sensitive_.'

'Saving your presence, my lady, but you _are_ hiding at your own feast.'

'Putting my name on it doesn't make it mine.'

'If that were true, then you wouldn't have bothered to attend at all.'

'I am here because His Grace commanded me to attend, Ser Jaime.'

'And that angers you?'

'It inconveniences me.'

'Are you on duty?'

'You know that I'm not.'

'You're not on duty, and he _still _commanded you to attend?'

'Yes.'

'But why –'

Jaime stopped, considered, understood and laughed.

'Ah.'

She cocked her head at him like a cat.

'What do you mean 'ah'?' she demanded; her cold, systematic indifference disappearing so quickly that Jaime almost jumped in surprise.

'I have simply come to the conclusion,' he shrugged, successfully hiding his discomfort, 'that certain scandalous rumours circulating about the court are about the wrong Stark sister; that is all.'

She laughed at him.

'Don't be absurd.'

Jaime smiled broadly.

'A Kingsguard trying to hide from the King is in no position to lecture people on being absurd, my lady.'

'Neither is a Kingsguard who killed one.'

'Are we speaking of honour now, Lady Stark?' he quipped.

'I don't know, are we?' she snapped.

'I've always found the subject rather tedious,' Jaime said, pursing his lips and pretending to look to the skies for inspiration, 'but since you insist on broaching it, I must admit that you _do_ make me wonder what your honourable lord father would have felt if he had lived, and discovered that his own blood was serving the dragon spawn that he fought so very valiantly to depose.'

'And I in my turn wonder what the dishonourable Tywin Lannister would have felt if he had lived,' she heatedly replied, 'and discovered that his own blood had chosen to swear allegiance rather than fight to the death like a good Lannister.'

Jaime shrugged.

'Disappointment, most likely. It was his favourite emotion where his children were concerned.'

Lady Arya stared hard at him; her gaze transforming; becoming weary and retreating, and for a moment, he could have sworn that she was seeing another face, and another pair of eyes in the place of his. She reached out without a trace of reluctance or embarrassment and touched his cheek; her fingers brushing his jaw; and she turned his head slowly to the side as though searching for something; though what, he couldn't say.

She let her hand drop with startling abruptness, and promptly looked away from him.

'I'm leaving now,' she said blandly; not moving.

'Are you?' Jaime questioned, intrigued, 'where to?'

'The place of the Kingsguard is by the king's side.'

'The same king that you've been hiding from all evening?'

'I haven't been hiding from him,' she blandly insisted, and though everything in her demeanour announced that she was telling the truth, Jaime could not bring himself to believe her. Her mask was too perfect; her speech too controlled.

So he thoughtfully drummed his fingers on the balustrade, continued to observe her, and noted with confusion that she was still making no move to rise to her feet.

'I'll take a wild guess, then, Lady Stark,' Jaime said, 'since you're being so very communicative about whom you're hiding from, and why.'

'I am _not _hiding,' she repeated softly; life beginning to creep back into her voice.

Jaime ignored her, and continued.

'You were King Aegon's sworn shield for most of the Targaryen conquest. I know this because the dragons and their armies trumpeted it from the rooftops at every opportunity. You were at his back for every day of every siege; for every hour and every minute of every battle. Most likely you saved his worthless royal hide half a hundred times, and very often wished him dead yourself if it would only release you from the seemingly impossible duty of protecting the fool from himself. I've been a sworn shield enough times to know that it's the most frustrating fucking thing that exists. Kings will insist on willingly throwing themselves into situations where they're the _most _likely to die, and if they _do _die, they get all the glory, and the poor bastard guarding them gets all the dishonour. Now _you_, Lady Stark – you must have done a passing good job. The King is still alive, after all. But it is in the very nature of kings to be bored, delusional and accustomed to getting what they want. In consequence, our beloved King Aegon very likely thinks that your enthusiasm in protecting him during battle translates to genuine regard; _and _that your vows of chastity imply a _disregard_ for the existence or non-existence of your maidenhead. And so, because you're conveniently both a Kingsguard and a woman; a protector _and_ a potential source of amusement; he's taken to asking you to 'protect' him in ways that do not involve sword or lance or mace. Am I correct?'

The girl's face was red, and furious.

'I haven't given in to him,' she declared hotly.

'I congratulate you upon your restraint,' Jaime chuckled, delighted by her discomfort, 'he is a handsome man.'

'It's not a matter of _restraint_,' Lady Arya spat indignantly, 'it's a matter of honour.'

'Ooh, a matter of honour!' Jaime scoffed, 'come now, Lady Stark, don't be such a bore. Why not amuse yourself while you're still young? There _are_ precedents of Kingsguard fucking royalty, though few of them ended well. I can give you a list if you wish.'

'I don't want a stupid list!'

"A stupid list?' How old are you, ten?'

He grinned as her grey eyes expressed the desire to murder him.

'I would _never_ give in to His Grace, even if he commanded me to!' Lady Arya insisted, 'and Ser Barristan says that he will never condone such a –'

'Ser Barristan says what serves his own interests,' Jaime interrupted, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice, 'how else do you think the sanctimonious old shit has managed to serve four different kings and live?'

Lady Arya's eyes blazed like wildfire, and Jaime chuckled to himself as he watched her fight a conscious battle with her own anger. Her breath pulsed violently in her throat, and her face was beautiful in its wrath…but her voice, when she spoke, was perfectly steady, and the rest of her body followed suit.

'Ser Barristan doesn't deserve your disdain, Ser Jaime.'

'I have lived far longer than you, my lady. I've earned the right to disdain whom I please'

'If you dislike him so much, then why did you spare him?'

Jaime's confidence deflated immediately.

'How do you know about that?' he demanded.

'I saw it happen,' she said.

Jaime waited, expecting her to crow over him and call him a coward at the very worst. But she stared down at her hands for a moment, almost shyly, before looking up at him again with something that he would have called respect had he not been speaking to a Stark.

'It was at the siege of Casterly Rock,' she said, 'after the walls collapsed…after the dragons came. I was charging into the breach after His Grace for what felt like the fifteenth time that morning. You were perhaps – ten feet away? It was in a narrow hallway. There was hardly any room to move at all – two men could barely walk abreast. The corpses underfoot didn't help either, of course. You were at the far end…and Ser Barristan came at you. He moved so quickly that I thought the Faceless God had sent him, to take you to the Night Lands. But you were quicker. You chopped Ser Barristan's sword in half like it was made of paper. The force of it knocked him to the ground like a sack of potatoes. He was winded. He was utterly helpless. You could have killed him in a dozen different ways, but you didn't. You just left him there, and walked away from him…I've always wanted to ask you why.'

'Have you?' Jaime snapped, convinced that she was mocking him, 'and why, may I ask, didn't you point His Grace in my direction the moment you saw me?'

'I wanted to kill you myself,' Lady Arya shrugged.

Jaime laughed uproariously.

'Really?' he guffawed, 'is that how they say 'I was too shit scared' in the North?'

'Fuck yourself, Lannister,' Lady Arya sighed.

'It's surprisingly difficult to do when you're missing your good hand,' Jaime sighed in return, surprised, and a little disappointed, that his words hadn't angered her.

'That doesn't seem very likely,' she continued, cocking an eyebrow at him, 'after learning to fight left-handed, fucking left-handed must be a breeze.'

'Not at all. The former was much easier to learn than the latter.'

Lady Arya's gaze flickered from his face, to his stump, and back again, as though she were seeing the lie.

She did not pursue it, and he was grateful for it.

'Why didn't you kill Ser Barristan?' she repeated softly.

Jaime's first instinct was to tell her to mind her own fucking business. His second was to pay his first no mind.

'When I was a boy,' Jaime said, 'we lived through our own Age of Heroes. The days of Ser Gerold Hightower and Prince Lewyn Martell; of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning; of Ser Jonothon Darry and Ser Oswell Whent, and yes, of Ser Barristan fucking Selmy; the days when it didn't matter how many coins you had in your pocket or how many times you'd fucked my sister; only what you could do with your blade and your body; the life you could create in taking life. It was its own kind of beauty; its own kind of…perfection. It was its own way – the only way – of being alive. Wearing white plate meant something, then. It was the foundation of beauty and life and perfection. It was the foundation of everything that was right. So yes, I spared Ser Barristan instead of cutting off his venerable white head, because…because he was a part of that, some part…I spared him because he is all that is left.'

The girl's face was wonder and recognition and fear as he spoke.

'Don't you count yourself?' she asked.

'Barristan the Bold never did,' Jaime scoffed.

She was looking intently at him now. Her eyes made him uncomfortable.

'You don't hate him at all,' she said, 'you want to be him.'

Jaime couldn't look at her.

'No, Lady Stark,' he replied, 'I don't hate him.'

Arya smiled at him; transforming yet again, as though hers was the very face of contradiction; pale with indifference one moment and tense with anger the next; constantly saying one thing and constantly meaning another; her heartbeat constant, the rest of her erratic; like a pendulum to a clock that never stopped.

'I'm beginning to think it a great pity that we never crossed swords during the conquest, Ser Jaime,' she told him, 'it would have amused me greatly.'

Jaime smiled back at her.

'It would have pleased me to amuse you greatly before your imminent death.'

She laughed out loud, as though he had lost his mind.

'Before _your _imminent death, do you mean?' she corrected.

'That is certainly not what I mean,' Jaime clarified breezily.

'Are you saying you could beat me in a fair fight?' she demanded.

'I'm saying that I could annihilate you in a fair fight,' Jaime responded.

'Care to put it to the test?'

'_Do you have a death wish, little girl?_'

'Noon tomorrow in the practice yard?'

'No.'

'Scared?'

'I cannot fight women.'

She grinned impertinently at him.

'_Cannot?_' she repeated.

'I _will_ not,' he growled.

He'd only ever fought one woman, Brienne, and that wasn't going to change any time soon.

He felt his stomach lurch at the memory of what her eyes had looked like in death; frozen in horror, like they hadn't belonged to her anymore. And they hadn't, of course. From the moment that she had gone, they had been nothing more than a pair of staring eyes in a fucking severed head.

'Who was she?' Arya asked quietly.

The question was so unexpected that for a moment he was unsure whether or not she was talking to him.

'Who was who?' he replied in a clear voice.

'Don't lie,' she replied, 'there's no point.'

Jaime stared at her with a mix of amazement and horror, before leaning towards her and opening his mouth with every intention of telling her to fuck both herself and the tricks the Faceless Men had taught her. It was only then that he realised that her words had had no malice in them; no mockery and no laughter. In her face he saw calm, gravity…and…was it relief?

Her hands were resting quietly on her knees; her long dark hair was like a river of night against her pale leathers; and she was regarding him with a rare sort of understanding that had no pity in it: with the silent greeting that always ushered in the unspoken, unassuming companionship between speakers of the language of loss. The loss of husbands, and wives…and lovers.

'Who was he?' Jaime asked.

The colour drained suddenly and alarmingly from Arya's face, and for a moment, he thought she was going to faint.

'Who?' she blurted.

Jaime could not help but roll his eyes at her. Why open a door only to close it again?

Arya was staring at him with something like terror; though terror of what, he could not say; and suddenly he remembered what she had looked like as a child; remembered the way that she had ignored the blade at her throat and looked left and right and behind her and in front of her; making sure that her wolf, whose life she valued more than her own, had not returned to save her; because saving her would mean death. That part of her; that capacity for selfless love was still inside her – he could see it in her fear and her compassion – except this time, it was hurting her; because whoever the object of that love had been, he had gone to the same place that Brienne had.

Her face was wide open now, and her eyes were a labyrinth of despair.

'I don't know what you mean,' Arya whispered, 'excuse me.'

No sooner had she leapt to her feet to leave; no sooner had he put out a hand to retain her; that cries and screams and the sound of blades being drawn erupted out of the world behind the curtain. Arya flickered from Jaime's side like a ghost, so quickly that he scarcely heard her move, and as she ripped the curtain back to enter the hall, the torchlight cutting like a knife, Jaime could have sworn that she left no shadow behind her.


	4. Chapter 4

The false Aegon had demanded that every person presently attending court wait upon him in the throne room of the Red Keep; and from her customary position before the stairs, the place seemed to Arya to veritably simmer with people; their brightly-coloured silks, velvets and brocades melting brilliantly into the red limestone; the grey and black austerity brought by Sansa and her Northerners swirling into the cracks between them like mortar.

More than an hour before the appointed time, when Queen Daenerys and Tyrion had been the only small council members already seated, people had already begun to flood into the throne room to await the king's arrival; and Arya had stood at guard two feet behind the pair of them, not even trying to avoid listening to their conversation. A Faceless Man could not tell himself to stop his ears, not even when he had been commanded to un-become what he was.

'They're not going to be happy about this,' Tyrion had said.

'If you'd held your tongue and not tried to be clever, this wouldn't even be necessary,' Queen Daenerys had snapped.

Tyrion had shaken his head at that.

'The strategy adopted by you and Aegon was a weak one. I told both of you as much before I left. This strife has been coming for a long time; for long before I returned to Westeros, if I have judged the situation correctly – '

The Queen had coloured, and had not replied.

'– and I can assure you that if last night's brawl had not been caused by me, it would almost certainly have been caused by somebody else. Somebody far less tactful, probably, and then we might have been in real trouble.'

'Forgive me if I remain unimpressed by the timing of your wit, Tyrion. You should be thanking the gods that no one died.'

Tyrion had smiled at that, and his reply had been made with genuine affection.

'Then you are forgiven, my queen.'

Queen Daenerys had continued to scold him, then, though something in her eyes seemed lighter.

Soon after this exchange, a large contingent of gold cloaks and black cloaks had entered the hall, and had positioned themselves in a thoroughly intimidating fashion, around the entire perimeter of the room. They, like the Kingsguard, were to wait for the signal from Ser Barristan, just as the king had commanded earlier that morning, and were to allow nobody to leave the hall until such time as the thing was done. Arya thought that wonderfully practical, but expected that the sight of all those guards would have the effect of making people less inclined to attend court than they would normally be, even if the king had commanded it.

The courtiers, however, had continued to flock to the hall and to chatter away regardless; their eyes consigning soldiers of the lower orders to the same status as cheap carpets beneath their feet. Only those nobles who had fought in the war seemed to show the slightest concern at the heavy military presence, and it was only when Aegon entered and took up his place on the Iron Throne that silence truly fell, and anything resembling anticipation began to truly permeate the air.

Arya took up her place at the foot of the stairs before the throne; her eyes slowly and systematically scanning the hall, before coming to rest on Jaime Lannister; the man who had looked inside her.

She glanced briefly and bitterly over her shoulder at Queen Daenerys.

_This is all her fault_, she thought,_ this confusion and this effort and this being and not being. All her fault. All her mercy. _

Being either Arya or No one thanks to Daenerys' efforts: _that_, she might have called mercy. Fluctuating between the two like a lunar eclipse half-frozen in the sky so that Her Grace might feel better about herself…Arya had no idea what one might call that, but as she turned away from the throne, her eyes flickered once again to the place where they should not be.

Jaime was standing in the first gallery reserved always for members of the Great Houses; his eyes bright, but bored; his presence almost violently powerful despite how he had changed, and why. Arya had never cared much for beauty, it having been impressed upon her at an early age that it was something she would never possess, but even as a little barbarian of eleven concerned with nothing but the prospect of future glory, she had (grudgingly) been forced to acknowledge that Jaime Lannister was a very handsome man (though apparently incapable of getting a haircut); tall, golden, jewel-like and almost hauntingly beautiful; like the knights in the songs that fought in battles and lived for hundreds of years. Now, his beard did little to conceal the fact that thin scars traversed his entire face like lines on a map. His hair was a tangled mop of premature silver and grey, his eyes were wide and sleepless, and he had lost a tremendous amount of weight; as though his torturers had deliberately (and vainly) set out to destroy the lightning strike and flame of what his presence did each time he walked into a room.

Arya almost snorted aloud. Using knives and instruments to torture a man was so primitive.

Jaime sensed her gaze, and met her eyes with his. She kept her face cold as stone. But there was a hurricane in her blood that her will could not quiet, and that made her chest feel too living; the hurricane that had come to her when she had seen the mirror image of her own grief inside him, after years of imagining herself to be completely alone. The rush in her blood as the realisation had gripped her had been its own kind of ecstatic, extraordinary, enthralling relief. Until the moment that he had looked as deeply into her as she had looked into him, and her relief had been replaced by terror.

It had been her masters' solemn command that she tell no one of _it,_ and she had certainly preferred it that way…though sometimes, with Tyrion, or the queen…and last night, with Jaime, she had thought…

No. She had not thought. She did not want to think. She could not. She would purge the entire episode from her own memory if such a thing were possible; not because she was ashamed of it – she would never be ashamed of it – but because the things it did to her mind and her body were…

The threat of _it _was everywhere, hidden in the mundane and the everyday. Her blood would freeze in her veins if she heard a voice with the same illuminations and darknesses that his had had; the same awkwardness around certain syllables; the same glorious voluptuousness around others that characterised the speech of all Lorathi who spoke the Common Tongue. Sometimes in the dark, she had felt enveloped by his voice; as though it were a thing of flesh and blood. But the worst thing of all was the way that she could no longer endure the sight of hazel eyes; a common torture; a frequent one; because all that she would see in the colour that she had once loved were Jaqen's eyes: wide open, lightless, lifeless.

The memory of him was her weakness and her vulnerability; the one thing, _the only thing_, that could paralyse her where she stood, and neither Arya Stark nor No one could afford to be paralysed, not even for an instant.

The fear of Jaime, and of what he had seen, had kept her awake all night; and for several hours, she had toyed with the idea of simply going to his chambers and killing him. It would be an easy execution. She had fifty different poisons in her brown leather case; half of which could easily get it done before morning.

Then her heart had slowed, and her breath had levelled, and she had realised that protection lay in the place that Queen Daenerys had wished out of existence. She would simply have to become No one, entirely and completely, if the need ever arose to speak to him again. Forgetting about Arya would be to forget the thing that he had seen inside her. Forgetting about Arya would ensure that he would never see it again.

The herald was calling for silence, the courtiers were eagerly obeying, and in her mind's eye Arya saw Aegon sitting upright on the Iron Throne behind her; staring his lords down like the three-headed dragon that decorated his doublet; the gold of his crown glinting impressively against his silver hair; the royal brows furrowed in power and wrath.

_There must be something wrong with me, _Arya thought, _most women in the kingdoms would kill to have such a man inappropriately propositioning them._

'House Targaryen did not win the Seven Kingdoms back from the line of the Usurper so that chaos and division should continue to reign – so that North and South should continue to be at each other's throats until the end of time,' Aegon declared, his tone formidable and his displeasure evident, 'we won these kingdoms back to create a Golden Age the likes of which this world has never seen; a Golden Age won in the currency of peace, in which all men might be brothers. When my queen and I first began to move together across Westeros, we saw a realm so torn up by war that it resembled the carcass of a living thing. The land breathed still, and so did its people, but only barely. We undertook to bring relief, and to bring peace; to bring tolerance and understanding; and in all our dealings, to obliterate hatred, and the desire for vengeance.'

There was complete silence in the hall; expectant and discomforted.

'We named equal numbers of Northerners and Southerners to prominent positions in government, in the name of learning to work together,' Aegon promptly continued, 'we did the same with relief efforts sent out to those areas worst affected by the war. We encouraged fostership between North and South so that we might learn to understand one another through our children. We welcomed this effort and this noble goal.'

Feet had begun to shuffle throughout the hall, and faces to turn red with anger, and still Aegon continued, the force of his voice growing greater, and enraged:

'We welcomed this effort, and this _noble goal_,' Aegon half-spoke, half-spat, 'this attempt to bring peace to our land, and it was assumed that the lords and ladies of Westeros; being sensible, educated beings capable of appreciating the general undesirability of war, would undertake to welcome it too; to _listen _to each other in the spirit of goodwill and reconciliation despite the horrors and injustices of the past; and to settle their grievances in council before the Iron Throne, as civilised human beings, rather than on some muddy field already so saturated in blood that it would hardly bear any more of it. And yet what have we found, over the past year? Northerners slaughtered in the Westerlands for no better reason than their origins; Southerners stoned to death at White Harbour for similar reasons. We have seen farms burned, women raped and men killed on both sides for the most tragic and ludicrous reasons; we have seen maesters killed for treating the wounded; we have seen half the orchards in the Reach set on fire and the defacement of almost every weirwood tree from the Red Fork to the Wall. We have not seen a sovereign realm, my lords and ladies. We have seen a realm in anarchy. And too many times in court – far too many times – I have heard 'low birth' blamed for this: the peasantry, the poor…even '_the minor nobility,_' from the more obnoxious of you. I have seen the guilty laying responsibility for these atrocities at the doors of the guilty and the innocent alike, and I answer you, my lords and ladies, that none are responsible for this but you yourselves. These are your people, and your lands, and you are answerable both for your people's behaviour and for their welfare. This division, this _chaos_, this willingness to draw both swords and blood in retribution for the pettiest of insults or imagined slanders, that last night saw a common brawl at _a welcoming feast_, in the _great hall _of the Red Keep, the seat of all power in our kingdoms – this strife, this _lunacy_, _has to stop_. By all the gods, have you no shame at all? Have you no notion of self-control? I declare that you have made my queen and I feel quite foolish. In the past year, we have expected you _and trusted you_ to embrace goodwill and reconciliation, thinking it to be the dearest wish of all thinking and feeling human beings after a decade of bloodshed and slaughter…but last night, when we saw swords drawn _in the presence of the king and queen_; _fighting_ in the hall and surrounds; the threatening of ladies of gentle birth and of old men and women incapable of defending themselves; the injury of fifteen black cloaks, three Kingsguard and a half-complement of gold cloaks, _all because of some ridiculous jape uttered by an unusually verbose person, now near me_…when my queen and I observed this last night, we realised, once and for all, that none of you can be trusted to keep the peace at court, leave alone in your own lands. We have therefore determined that we shall have to stand over you and hold your hands like children, since you have all proven to be children in mind. This realm desires peace. This realm demands peace, and by all the gods, it will have peace, one way or another. Ser Jaime Lannister and Lady Sansa Baratheon, step forward.'

The crowd was terrifyingly and deathly silent now, and remained so under the threat of Aegon's glare as Jaime and Sansa made their way to the foot of the stairs; mutual hatred; North and South; history; glimmering like a sheet of ruddy metal between them. Aegon regally stared them down. Arya simply looked at them; Sansa, whom she no longer knew, standing directly and unseeingly in front of her; Jaime, whom she could no longer know, slightly further away; his presence making her uncomfortable.

'Together,' the false king said, 'the pair of you control a more sizeable portion of my kingdom that I am comfortable with. I congratulate you on it.'

The courtiers, relieved to have something to chortle about after the stern severity of Aegon's lengthy discourse, dutifully roared with laughter.

'In that light,' Aegon frostily declared, 'I am delighted to announce that you are to be joined together as husband and wife in the sight of gods and men, in the hope that your union, and your progeny, will bridge the gap between North and South, and usher in the peace that we have craved so desperately.'

There was a brief silence; then an equally brief realisation; then pandemonium as the full implications of Aegon's words crashed into the mind and voice of the crowd and drove it into chaos.

The colour in each high individual pane of glass seemed suddenly to become too much for it; squirming and writhing in agony, and screaming out in the voices of the undead. A wall of sound thundered in the very stones as roars of protest from every part of the hall made the slabs beneath their feet quake, and fires normally kept dead in court reignite with both spontaneity and arson. Fathers restrained sons from seeking out old enemies and attacking them where they stood; mothers held their daughters to them and tried to stop their ears, even as septas did the same with their charges. In the cacophony Arya heard pleas, threats, tears, prayers, and memories; every person that had lost his or her life during the war seeming to rise like a ghost from mass graves; sepulchres; ditches on the side of the road; rivers; oceans and vast deserts full of ashes to scream into the ears of the living and to rip their hearing from them. Scuffles began to break out, and small charges made towards the doors. Arya and her brothers turned their heads towards Ser Barristan; their hands on their weapons. He nodded grimly. And across the hall, innumerable swords were drawn from the belts and scabbards of gold cloaks, black cloaks and Kingsguard alike; murdering pandemonium and muzzling its voice.

The silence was instantaneous. Swords wedded to their bodies were like a glowing wall of knives. And Arya heard Aegon leaning back in his ugly iron chair; triumph heavy in his voice as he spoke.

'Does anyone wish to protest?'

Arya gripped her sword too hard to wield it. She heard the still births of a thousand words in the air; a thousand utterances retracted before they became sounds.

_Is this what peace sounds like?_ Arya thought.

Her sister was glaring upwards at the throne; her face beautiful and pale in its fury. And Ser Jaime was glaring into his own past; paying no attention to the woman beside him.

* * *

Since Jaime's dismissal from the Kingsguard, he had been strictly forbidden from ever setting foot inside the white sword tower again. At the time, he had found this hugely funny in an excruciatingly bitter sort of way: '_they think dismissal from a _building_ is enough to unmake a fucking Kingsguard?' he had thought, 'What are they going to do? Change the locks? Put a sign on the door?'_

Intriguing as the notion had been, he had never attempted to see what measures might have been put in place to keep him out. He had always imagined that they would have done _something_: he was, after all, the madman who had led thousands of men into battle against three bloody dragons. And yet tonight, when the fingers of his left hand fastened around the door handle, the white door opened easily and noiselessly, and he felt his heart sinking at the sight of the moonlight that flooded the white rooms and turned the view of the sea silver.

_I'm not a threat anymore, _he realised bitterly, _I'm a fucking pawn. _

_I've become smaller. _

_I've waned._

Twenty years ago, nobody would have dared drag him before the Iron Throne and command him, as though he were a child, to marry, and sacrifice, and do his duty. Twenty years ago, people had still been fucking terrified of him, and the name of Lannister had still commanded respect.

Not that he hadn't given it a reasonably good fight, under the circumstances. Lady Sansa too, for that matter. Once King Aegon had grown tired of his own theatrics, he had sent directly for the marriage contract, which was duly brought before him along with a writing table and ink, and shoved beneath their noses with the entire court still in attendance. Lady Sansa and Jaime had stood facing each other and hating each other along with the lords of both their realms; refusing to comply, refusing to listen, and refusing to do so much as speak. King Aegon had shrugged courteously in the face of their disobedience and had commanded his Kingsguard to cut both their heads off, and to bring forward the next in line to their respective titles, to be betrothed in their stead.

'Though do try not to get blood on the marriage contract,' Aegon had said, 'the parchment is from Volantis.'

Jaime had taken one look at the blatant eagerness on Ser Barristan's face, and Lady Sansa at the appalling pallour of her sister's, and they had both acquiesced in simultaneous compliance and fury; Jaime's signature an untidy scrawl; Lady Sansa's tearing a hole in the paper.

The world had erupted into colourful, screeching noise around him, and he had thought of Brienne, and felt sick.

But tonight, the world around him was white and blue; the colours of familiarity, and of a glorious past that made his future seem all the more terrible.

He passed the council table and climbed the stairs to the sleeping cells; the white stones familiar beneath his feet and the darkness thick with the snores of whichever lowborns and ingrates and overconfident little tulips were not on duty tonight. But there was a light burning in the gap beneath the door of the cell that had once been his, and he knew, instinctively, that that was the one he had come here to knock on.

The door opened slowly, but immediately, and Arya blinked composedly at him with wide grey eyes; her face calm as the surface of a lake. She was dressed in plain woollen breeches and a shirt of foreign design cut rather lower than conventional Westerosi modesty dictated; and though her hair looked like she hadn't put a comb to it in weeks, his presence did not inspire her to try to fix it.

_A freak among women_.

'You're still up,' Jaime ventured.

'I've woken up,' Arya quietly responded, 'I'm going to the dragon pit.'

It took a moment for that to sink in.

'The _dragon pit_?' Jaime repeated.

'The dragons are fed every night at the hour of the owl,' she told him, 'they can't get through the night without eating.'

The conversation petered abruptly away, and the girl leaned awkwardly against the doorframe, waiting for him to speak further.

He said nothing.

'What is it?' Arya asked.

'I wish to speak to you,' Jaime replied.

'Why?'

When he answered the question with a nonchalant shrug; she sighed deeply, stepped out of the room and pulled the door closed behind her; not looking at him.

'You'll have to walk down with me,' she said, 'I can't stop now.'

Jaime had no desire to go within a hundred miles of those monsters again, but he wasn't about to tell her that. So they walked down to the dragon pit in silence; every step seeming to scream at him like thousands of men, and women, and children as they slowly burned alive. The further they walked, the louder the screams became, and as Jaime's mind and body frantically urged him to retreat rather than to go forward; he ground his teeth, cursed himself and kept walking; glancing intermittently at the girl beside him in the hope that she might give him something else to think about.

No assistance was forthcoming. Her face was grim, impenetrable and lifeless; locked in perpetual indifference.

They walked down staircase upon staircase, they passed through guarded doors and gates and arches, and when they finally reached the great doors of the dragon pit, Arya placed her hand firmly over the keyhole and stepped back as the doors rasped open with a rattle of chains and a harsh groaning of stone on stone.

The dragon pit was a dark, crude, cavernous, arena-like hole in the ground that Lord Varys had 'discovered' shortly after the conquest. It was possible to walk sideways for a hundred feet or more, and impossible to walk forwards for more than ten; thus providing plenty of room for running for one's life and as little room as possible for unwittingly falling into the pit itself. It was a primitive, but very effective resting place for Queen Daenerys' monsters while their true home, the great dome on Rhaenys' hill that had lain ruined and vaultless and empty to the sky for centuries, was rebuilt to be greater than its predecessor had ever been. 'Once completed,' King Aegon had apparently declared, 'its bronze doors will stand open again for the first time in a century, so that all the world may flock to this city and see the might of House Targaryen for themselves.'

Jaime shuddered at the thought as he approached the edge of the pit and peered into it. The dragons looked upwards at him in eerie unison, and as Arya greeted them in High Valyrian from a place beyond his vision, all three began to growl; their eyes glowing in the half dark.

'Come away from the edge!' Arya barked.

Jaime didn't need to be told twice (_why the fuck did I come here?)_, and retreated as far back as was possible without actually leaving the room. A faint light was shining from a large, rectangular gap in the floor some five feet to the left of him, and it was in this direction that Arya moved; continuing to jabber away in High Valyrian as though the bloody beasts were human beings. As she reached the gap in the floor, her fingers touched the wall above it, and fumbled slightly in the dark before closing around a chain that was almost invisible to the naked eye. She gave it a casual pull, a shrieking racket ensued, and Jaime watched the weak light before her feet dwindle, then die completely as a stone slab bearing what looked like the entire contents of a butcher's shop was brought up from the level below.

Arya removed a pair of thick leather gloves from her belt, donned them, and began the apparently-normal process of picking up dead animals, walking to the edge, and heaving them into the pit one by one. A cacophony of snarls, growls and blood-chilling screeches began to emerge from the pit, but still she continued to speak to the dragons and more than once seemed to be scolding them, without fear of death or retribution.

Still, she did not look at him.

'Why does a Kingsguard get up every night to do a servant's job?' Jaime asked.

'I'm good with animals,' Arya replied; saying nothing else.

Jaime smirked, leaned back against the wall and silently watched her work as she moved back and forth, back and forth, from the stone slab to the edge of the pit; flinging, tossing and sometimes dropping an increasingly great variety of corpses, some of them very heavy, down to the dragons in their pit below. She continued her one-sided High Valyrian conversation without the slightest trace of embarrassment, and frowned, or occasionally smiled, as the more expressive-sounding of her phrases were greeted with equally expressive snorts, shrieks and purrs that could have signified anything from grumpiness to appreciation to wrath. More than once, Jaime found himself on the point of leaping forward and pulling her away from the edge, but regardless of whatever sound the dragons made, she did not seem to share his concern. Once, he might have called it bravery. Today, he called it stupidity.

_Brienne might have lived, had she only known the difference._

When she had finished, Arya removed her gloves, replaced them and sent the empty stone slab crashing back down to the level below. Only then did she favour him with her best blank stare.

'What did you want to speak to me about?' she asked.

'Your sister,' Jaime replied, in as measured a manner as he could.

'Yes, of course,' Arya acknowledged, nodding curtly and coming to stand in front of him, 'my sister. I must congratulate you.'

'Fuck your congratulations, Lady Stark,' Jaime spat, irrationally infuriated by her tone.

'Is there some point to this conversation,' Arya ventured impassively, 'or do you mean to stand here insulting me all night?'

'I'll stop insulting you the moment you start making sense!' Jaime exclaimed.

_What has happened to her?_

'It is traditional to offer congratulations upon the announcement of betrothals,' Arya replied, 'I thought that I _was_ making sense.'

'So you approve of this lunacy?'

'It's not my place to approve or disapprove of it.'

'You are the lady's sister. It is usual to presume that you know her enough to approve or disapprove.'

Arya's eyes seemed to turn inward then; as though seeing herself rather than him.

'I know little of anything at all, save taking life,' she murmured, her face shifting and changing as she thought of the sister that she hardly knew at all. It made Jaime think of himself, and Tyrion; his brother who had steadfastly refused to see him since his return from Braavos.

_I should have told him the truth about the girl from the beginning, _Jaime thought, _I should have told Father to fuck himself and stood by my brother. I was a man grown at the time. I could easily have done it. _

Jaime looked at Arya again. She had remained eerily silent during his brief introspection; standing opposite him like a speechless, motionless slab of ice, and Jaime was seized by a sudden impulse to take her by the shoulders and shake some bloody life into her.

_What is the _matter _with the girl? _he thought.

Then he realised that the person that he had met the previous evening – that wild-blooded, hot and cold, easily irritated and inexplicably compassionate entity – had been a rarity; a gift; something that only emerged by accident, and very rarely by will. Most of the time, she was this. A brick wall.

_No._

'You need to marry Sansa,' Arya said, confirming his suspicions.

When he did not reply, she looked frankly at him: cold, firm, lifeless.

'I can see that's not what you wanted to hear, Ser Jaime,' she observed.

'Can't I be free for once in my life?' Jaime replied, with some heat, 'haven't I earned it?'

'No living creature is ever truly free, no matter what he's 'earned," the girl smiled bitterly, 'anyone who thinks otherwise, particularly at your age, is an idiot.'

'Now you sound like my father,' Jaime snapped.

Her jaw tightened – slightly.

'You have no choice in this,' Arya continued, 'there is too much at stake. If you go back on your word now, the kingdoms will descend into anarchy, and worse. The Northerners will be relieved, but will convince themselves that they have been insulted; the South will rush to defend its honour, and we'll all be at war before the week's out.'

_Wake up. I want to talk to you. Please._

'Don't be so bloody dramatic!' Jaime sneered, in as irritating a tone as he could muster.

'I'd rather be dramatic than selfish,' Arya responded, remaining aloof, 'you ought to be ashamed of yourself.'

'_Ashamed of myself?_' Jaime repeated in disbelief, '_selfish? _Come and see what your bitch sister's ambition has done to my homeland and then we'll talk about _selfish!_'

The girl's lips parted. Her cheeks flushed momentarily, and for a moment, the War of Five Kings seemed to nestle ominously in every particle of her skin; threatening to explode into shards of wildfire and stone, and bring her mask crashing down.

Jaime saw the threat, and found himself holding onto it like hope.

_I want to speak to the person beneath the fall of stone and wildfire. I want to speak to the person who, without having to ask me why, will understand why I cannot do this thing. Wake up. Please._

But Arya's mouth was slowly closing again; the threat was fleeing from her face; her eyes were dying; and she was looking at him disinterestedly and silently; as though his last words had _not_ been a grievous insult to herself and to her family; as though the Arya Stark that he had spoken to last night would not have tried to slit his throat for saying such a thing.

He reached out and touched her face in the same way that she had touched his the night before: searchingly, intimately, and without embarrassment. Her expression did not change, and neither did her eyes; the mask did not crumble and the wall did not break. But the skin beneath his fingertips was scalding hot, and he could feel the shadow of her blood as it thundered in her veins.

'Wake up,' he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

'I am awake.'

_And I'm a fool._

He dropped his hand. A thousand insults plunged into his mind and nestled painfully on his tongue.

And yet in the end, he said nothing; stepping back from her, turning on his heel and hating himself as he walked quickly away.

* * *

Chapter notes

The first part of this chapter was inspired by a particularly badass moment in _Rome_ season 2: can't remember which episode, though L


	5. Chapter 5

At first, Arya was much surprised by the excellence of the jousting; her decision made as she and Loras Tyrell stood fuming at Aegon and Daenerys' side, about to scream in frustration that they were not participating themselves. But as the tournament progressed, her anger began to abate, somewhat, as she slowly realised that all the knights riding in the tourney held in celebration of her sister's upcoming wedding, had fought in the war of conquest and had lived to tell the tale; meaning that they were either cowards, mavericks or extremely good fighters. All three qualities were sure-fire guarantees of an outstanding show, and Arya reasoned that if she was going to spend an entire day being miserable, she might as well be entertained while the proverbial storm thundered above her head.

A few short feet away from her, Sansa, the sister that she could not avoid forever, seemed to be having similar thoughts. She sat enshrined in a gown of grey brocade; all beauty and grace as her red hair shone like copper in the sun and illuminated the paleness of her cheeks with a silent internal glow. To an outsider, she might have been any bride radiant at the prospect of her wedding: she laughed and bowed her head, chattered delightedly with her ladies, clapped her hands enthusiastically at every victory, and courteously showed concern for each of the many knights injured or brought to the ground as the day progressed. She looked like a young girl living a dream.

She was an excellent actress.

The same could not be said, however, for the thousands of people, both high and lowborn, who merely a year after the end of one of the most vicious wars the kingdoms had ever seen, had turned out not to witness the bringing about of a peace that almost none of them believed in, but to see the spilling of more blood in a setting like a maiden's dream, full of brightly-coloured pennants that snapped in the wind, gorgeously-crafted armour that flashed blindingly in the sun, and ladies in beautiful dresses with handsome lords beside them; an _illusion_ in which the spilling of blood became a worthy and desirable thing, merely because it was done politely, chivalrously, hypocritically.

Arya would have done anything to be a part of that hypocrisy, for however short a time. Competing in a tourney was something she had wanted to do since the day she had learned to ride; since she had discovered what it felt like to feel the might of a horse between her legs. But before the tiniest wisp of that dream had been allowed to come to fruition in her calm and tangled mind, she and Loras had been placed firmly on duty for the day, like naughty children being punished without reason.

'It's no use looking at me like that, Arya,' Ser Barristan had said to her earlier that week, though she had not once voiced her thoughts on the matter, 'His Grace has determined that tensions are running high enough already without a woman competing too. All these enemies congregating in the same place is causing more fighting than the city watch can deal with.'

'Why did His Grace feel the need to punish Loras too?' Arya had replied.

Ser Barristan had looked pointedly at her, and she had understood.

_Holding only me back would set the tongues wagging._

Arya looked to the side at Aegon. His face was pale as ivory, and his eyes were bright with monarchy. He looked back at her. And she felt nothing but anger and mild annoyance.

She remembered the first time that she had stood guard over him; on the first night spent at Storm's End after the siege. The entire room had been black and gold with Baratheon livery and half burnt-out candlelight, and Aegon had sat alone at his desk writing letters, with Arya just opposite him at the door.

'What is your name, my lady?' he had asked her.

'Arya Stark, if it please Your Grace,' she had replied in a heavy voice.

At the mention of her family name, he had started, but he had not pursued it. He had returned to his letters as the waves had crashed and roared inhumanly outside; the eternal music of the gods' vengeance. Arya had listened, and watched, and felt, and tried with all her might to ignore the blistering pain in her left arm where an arrow had partially penetrated the plate during battle; each steady beat of her pulse sending splinters of fire roaring agonisingly up into the wound. Then Aegon had begun to pause intermittently in his letter writing, and to cast his violet eyes up at her, and each glance had hurt worse than that accursed hole in her arm, because she had known, immediately, what that glance had meant; and her memory would not let her endure the sight of another person looking at her like that. Still, she had endured it – she had had little choice – and had looked blandly back at His Grace with nameless eyes that did not see, or feel.

As a child, Arya had never been good with sigils, or House names, or House words, preferring instead to give knights and ladies her own names: 'the blue man,' 'the scowling man,' 'the one with the nose,' 'the one who shouts.' Her skills had not improved – for a decade, she had been accustomed to assassinating people named only to her as 'the man who sells insurance,' 'the man who beats his wife,' 'the man who sits before such-and-such a tavern at the Purple harbour,' 'the man who serves the Sealord.' And today, as the tourney progressed, and Loras, bored, began to propose bets in her direction each time two new knights faced each other, she continued to do as she had always done; cataloguing their childish nicknames in her head even as her brother Kingsguard shouted out what he thought would happen to them.

'This one will go down on the first tilt, Arya!' Loras declared of the man with the sun-darkened skin.

'I think not,' Arya protested coolly, 'he clings to his horse like nothing on earth.'

Loras rolled his eyes.

'A hundred gold dragons?'

'How about twenty?'

'I'll take it.'

And so they carried on.

She lost a lot of money. She knew how to see, but he knew how to joust, and loved it, and before too much time had passed, Loras was falling just short of bouncing on the balls of his feet with glee each time he won; his fair sister-in-arms remaining upright and disinterestedly poised despite sharing in his delight at the proceedings.

'Arya, he's going to fall!'

'Why?'

'His horse is terrified of him.'

'Is that a bad thing?'

'Yes!'

'I've heard many other knights say the contrary.'

'Many other knights are idiots.'

When the knight in question fell to the ground, Arya swore under her breath, even as Loras smirked like a Dothraki sacking a city, and suddenly Ser Barristan's voice was thundering in disapproval from behind them; the wrath of the gods in his eyes.

'Loras. Arya. You will focus your attentions on protecting your king, or I shall set about finding Kingsguard who can.'

'Yes, Lord Commander,' Arya and Loras mumbled, and turned back to the tourney; their hearts heavy again.

No sooner had they done so that Loras began to chuckle under his breath along with many of the nobles and commons present, and Arya followed the scent of their laughter to the right end of the lists. The man who had looked inside her, legions of blood swimming heatedly in the magnificent steel of his Lannister armour, was mounting up and accepting a lance from his squire; gripping it powerfully in his left hand as he awaited the beginning of the first tilt. His helmet covered most of his face, but Arya watched his eyes as they focussed serenely and severely on the knight opposite him; measuring and calculating and determining with the precision of a mathematician. He seemed oblivious to the taunts of the crowd, but Arya felt them for him as her blood rose slowly and reluctantly to meet his. And sensing it, his eyes flashed to hers; a spurt of wildfire in her chest, before his opponent became his world again; his opponent, and the lance gripped firmly in his hand.

Arya took a breath as the embers of the flame slowly died, then surged again. And still the crowd hooted and mocked, and Aegon and Daenerys sat quietly on their royal behinds, making no move to stop it.

_Apparently they're deaf to their own folly as well as blind to it_, Arya thought.

'This will be a fine show!' Loras was jeering, 'I'll bet you fifty dragons he falls off his horse before he so much as meets his opponent!'

'I'll bet you a hundred dragons he doesn't,' Arya graciously proposed, half-bowing to him.

'Are you touched?' Loras chuckled in reply, 'he's past forty. He's _old._'

'A hundred dragons, Loras!' Arya half-insisted, half-snapped, sullenly folding her arms and half-choking on the uncharacteristic anger that was suddenly consuming her no one-ness and dining upon it like a pack of wolves.

Loras stared at her.

'By all the gods, you're _angry _with me,' he exclaimed with undisguised astonishment, 'I didn't even know it was possible for you to _be_ angry.'

'Do we have a deal or don't we?' Arya drawled, ignoring him.

Loras' expression clearly suggested a belief that she had gone mad. Nevertheless, they clapped hands at a bargain and watched intently as the first tilt began.

Ser Jaime was facing a knight in gold and blue who rode a black horse. The horse took the knight forward in a rush of slowness and speed, even as Jaime's horse did the same, and the crowd roared out like all seven hells at once. All the world seemed to contract into the space between the two knights, and they flashed across the space between them in the dreadful, inevitable magnetism that exists between steel and blood.

The force of the first blow of Jaime's lance sent the knight flying out of the saddle at a velocity that was almost comical. When he struck the ground, the sound of his bones shattering within his armour was like the rattle of dice in a cup, even as he lay still and childlike and choking agonisingly on the tip of the lance that was lodged like a dagger in his throat.

His blood stained the sand red. Jaime gave him a cursory glance before trotting away without comment, and once the body had been taken away; the crowd jeering as it was quietly removed from the lists, Jaime Lannister progressed to the next set, and began to carve through the tourney (and through each of his opponents) like a knife through butter; offering his adversaries up like sacrifices.

He was a painter. A painter who only used red. The crowd marvelled at his art, and screamed at it, and called his name as he grew faster and deadlier, even as his lance seemed to grow sharper and harder with every passing tilt. He killed every one of his opponents with a single stroke of his brush; laying their throats and chests and heads bare as summer snow before drenching them in the awful, mighty, beautiful colours of his House.

_He might have killed me just as easily when I was a child – and just as beautifully. And I would have known nothing of it. I would only have known the fear, the pain and the darkness, like these men that he is slaughtering now. I would not have thought of beauty. I should not think of it now._

Surely unseating his opponents was enough. Killing them was unnecessary…cruel, even. From what Arya had heard, he had jousted for most of his life – he must know how _not _to kill just as well as he knew the opposite. But the louder the crowd screamed, the thirstier for blood he seemed to become. He spilled more of it onto the ground, and then more of it. It was horrifying to watch. It was mesmerising.

He rode them all down like a god of death; the power of his horse's body wedded to his own: hardness and endurance and strength. His armour fit him like a second skin; like a shroud drenched in the blood-stained skins of those he sent to meet the Stranger, and his lance was an annexure of himself, as Arya was sure his sword was also; its tip a truer end to his arm than his fingertips. The final tilt, set between him and an enormous knight in green armour, ended with Jaime's lance punching a large, bleeding hole in his opponent's hauberk. The point of the weapon slammed straight through the knight's body and exited on the other side; skewering him like a wild boar. The crowd bellowed out its approval, and the unfortunate knight expired just as noisily; his screams turning to moans, then to gurgles, then to whispers: a cry of pain turned softly and gruesomely into a prayer for death. And while Arya's masters had taught her that death should be a quiet thing, a merciful thing, painless, a Gift, this was…oh seven hells, this was breath-taking.

Her senses felt raw and stricken, and her mind out of focus and shaken. Her heart was pounding hard with lifeblood rediscovered, her breath was trapped dizzyingly in a place between her chest and throat, and as Ser Jaime tore his helmet off and flung it into the dirt, his silver hair emerging from the steel, streaked with blood, she recognised the warmth and the wetness that were aching inside her, and the realisation turned her pale.

_No._

As the crowd, forgetful of their earlier disdain, continued to chant Jaime's name, he also flung down his shield, and looked around him at the screaming crowd and applauding courtiers with the face of a lion who did not need their praise. He trotted forwards to the appointed place before the stands where King Aegon and Queen Daenerys sat silver and regal in their rich Targaryen red and black; his lance still clutched in his hand as he faced them.

King Aegon rose to his feet. The lords of Westeros rose with him.

'You are a great warrior, Ser Jaime,' Aegon declared, 'and everything that your legend promises. The bards will sing songs of the feats you have achieved today, and of the role your victory has played in bringing peace to this realm.'

Jaime smirked, and bowed his head in acknowledgment, and from the king's hand he gracefully accepted the champion's purse, and the crown of winter roses which he was to lay in the lap of the woman that he would crown queen of love and beauty.

Tradition, courtesy and the need for peace dictated that it should be his wife-to-be, and as Jaime turned his horse rather obviously in Sansa's direction, Arya knew, with a darkness that she assumed was relief, that since their conversation in the dead of night with the dragons growling in the pit beneath them, he had realised that there was no going back; that peace, or even the faintest possibility of it, was more important than his own desires.

The crown of winter roses dangled from the tip of Jaime's lance like a severed head, and swayed slightly as he suddenly turned his horse about and trotted away from Sansa and back towards the king; an impish grin lighting up his scarred face. He came to a stop directly in front of Arya and Loras, and, because the former was standing upright at guard, offered the crown to her on the tip of his lance with an air of indescribable insolence.

Arya stared hard at Jaime as the crowd fell silent; silently smothering the outward manifestation of her anger as it tightened the muscles in her jaw and threw her entire body into a raging desire to draw her sword and decapitate him where he stood for such a blatant act of provocation. The king, the queen, and the lords of the North and South were all looking on in deadly and unbearable anticipation; some looking at her; some looking at Aegon; all waiting, on the edges of their seats, to see how she would respond to the insult against her sister; how she would face the threat of war that hung heavy in the air like a bloody spectre, waiting for her on the other side of whichever decision she would make.

If she accepted the crown, the North would be offended. If she declined it, the South would be offended. Both sides would rush to defend themselves. And all Seven Kingdoms would once again sink into the blood-stained comfort and familiarity of war, and once again steer clear of the uncharted waters of reconciliation.

Jaime knew this. He knew all of it, and he didn't care; smiling at her as one would at an enemy that one had trapped in a corner.

_I was wrong about him, _Arya thought,_ he really _does _care for no one but himself; for nothing but his own freedom. _

And yet the way that he had fought had been beautiful – so unspeakably, achingly beautiful – and in his face she could see that beauty; that beauty, and the space inside him, the missing thing, the missing thing that he had and that she had too.

_That's all very well; _Arya thought, _but none of those things make the man any less of a jackass_.

She knew that she should have looked to her King to tell her what to do: to accept the crown, or to reject it, to accept war and to reject peace. She was only a servant of his will, after all, and such a decision should be his alone. But the crowd was beginning to fidget, and Jaime to look surer and surer of himself; and the King and Queen were whispering frantically together; saying nothing to her, doing nothing. And seizing Loras' arm as she murmured something about feeling hot, Arya took a step backwards and quietly pretended to faint.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter notes

Valar morghulis, all. A sudden splurge of creativity has produced an extra chapter before Sunday. I hope you enjoy it!

* * *

Jaime, smiling, looked up with more curiosity than alarm as his bedchamber door crashed open to reveal his squire, terrified (and still carrying a tottering pile of his master's armour); and Arya, furious.

'I'm sorry, my lord,' the squire blubbered, 'she just – '

'That's alright, boy,' Jaime interrupted, 'get out.'

The squire slammed the door behind him, and Jaime grinned delightedly as Arya strode into the room, walked straight up to him and shoved him in a way that would have been provocative had it not been so funny.

'Well, look who's come back to life!' Jaime mocked.

'_You_,' Arya spat; the fingers of her right hand fastening around his neck when her second shove send him careering backwards into a wall, 'you selfish, arrogant, repulsive _arse_.'

Jaime considered decking the little shit then and there for her insolence, but found that he rather enjoyed letting her think that she had a real chance of strangling him if she tightened her grip any further. Her confidence was delightful merely by virtue of her stupidity, and seeing her as she was when completely unburdened by poisonous foreign nonsense was far more absorbing than he had ever thought it could be.

She was glaring at him with a piercing, near-paralytic hatred; her breath resembling some cold and inadequate attempt to control the wrath that pulsed visibly and powerfully through her body like heat burning at the heart of a blade; but there was a visible kind of space around her; the missing thing; the same emptiness that had weakened her the first time they had spoken, but that strengthened her now; turning her eyes to iron and making her beautiful and flame-like and absolutely fucking glorious to watch; and to Jaime's profound shame, he found his cock stiffening in his breeches and his breath beginning to burn in his lungs.

_Gods be good, _he thought,_ this is _no time _to be thinking about your cock!_

'Can I help you, Lady Stark?' he pleasantly enquired.

'_What in seven fucking hells was that_?' Arya demanded, seething.

Jaime thought back to the tourney, and grinned.

'_That _was me telling the entire world to fuck off. Your fainting was an added bonus, of course. Was your boiled leather a size too small for you? Or were you overcome by my great good looks and sparkling personality?'

'I was _pretending _to faint, you camel's cunt!' Arya shouted.

'Camel's…what?' Jaime laughed.

'Do you have any _idea_ what would have happened if I had accepted or rejected that stupid crown?'

'Nothing pleasant, I should think –'

'You _bastard!_'

'- but at least I wouldn't have had to marry your sister.'

'And avoiding a marriage to someone you dislike is worth another decade of war, is it?'

'Don't you dare start bleating about selfishness again.'

'Is there another word for it?'

'Yes, there's another fucking word for it! _Decency. Loyalty._'

As the last word escaped his lips, Arya's grip on his throat slackened slightly, though her rage did nothing of the kind, and Jaime suddenly felt his own anger hammering fiercely and violently in his throat as he thought of ash, and screams, and dragonfire.

'How do I go home when this farce is over?' he growled; the new-born ghosts of his wrath thrashing raucously against Arya's fingers, 'how do I return to my people, walking by the side of the woman who destroyed them; who ruined them; who turned their realm into an underworld, and say: 'this is my lady wife'? _How do I do that? How can you compel me to do that? _How can Aegon? How do I _endure _the company of the woman who did that to my homeland? How do I ask the Westerlands to endure her? How do I marry her? How do I _fuck her_?'

'_You fuck her_,' Arya snarled, her grip tightening again, 'because thousands of people will die if you don't!'

'I'm afraid that's out of the question,' Jaime spat, 'I've always had a problem with red heads.'

'She has to marry the sire of the boy who chopped her father's head off,' the girl accusingly responded, 'I'd say her problems are worse than yours.'

Jaime could scarcely believe the injustice of what he was hearing.

'Did _I _chop your father's head off?' he demanded.

'No, but –'

'I was your brother's prisoner when it happened!'

'Really? Were you also his prisoner when the Lannister armies torched the Riverlands?'

'That was _completely_ different, you savage little – '

'_How _was it different? Was raping an entire realm acceptable because you were under orders? Or is this sudden concern for the common man something that's come upon you late in life?'

'_Late in life_?'

'Did turning my _mother's_ homeland 'into an underworld' concern you when you were battering your armies against the walls of Riverrun? Did it cross your mind when Winterfell was burned to ashes, and my younger brothers with it?'

'I had _nothing_ to do with –'

'And what about the Red Wedding? Were you seized by a similar attack of sensitivity when your father decided to butcher anyone and everyone that I might have –'

'The Red Wedding was Walder Frey's work, _not_ my father's!'

'Is that what you tell yourself at night?'

'Not this again –'

'_Not this again?_'

'Arya –'

She hit him. Properly, too. Harder than any woman had ever hit him. Splinters of pain roared sorely across his cheek before settling into dull, aching, glowing coals that invaded his skin and began to colour it red.

'Don't call me that,' Arya snarled, '_don't you fucking call me that._'

'I'm sorry,' Jaime snarled in return, livid at her willingness to condemn him when it suited her, 'I forgot that the dead have no names.'

'Fuck yourself, Lannister.'

Jaime smiled bitterly at that.

'I might have found all of this rhetoric very touching if I had had the _slightest thing to do _with any of the crimes that you blame me for,' he said, 'so far, I've heard you accuse me of no greater crime than being the son of Tywin Lannister. Can you really tell me that Sansa has committed no greater crime than being the daughter of Eddard Stark?'

The girl's face fell.

'I did not _say that_ –'

'Can you really tell me that some fucking _peace _that Aegon dreamed up one day, probably while sitting on his chamber pot, can really be an option after everything that has happened?' Jaime demanded.

The girl ignored him, and returned, with a sanctimonious gravity that she could only have learned from her father, to her original point.

'_You almost started a war today_,' Arya persisted, enunciating every syllable as though she were speaking to a halfwit, 'if you don't marry Sansa, _there will almost certainly be another war_. Is that what you want?'

'If I _do_ marry Sansa, there will _definitely_ be another war,' Jaime shot back, matching her tone, 'is that what _you_ want?'

When she did not reply immediately; the stubbornness and the blame on her young face not abating for an instant, Jaime found that the novelty of having her fingers fastened around his throat had worn off; as had any amusement that he could have derived from listening to her preaching. He shoved her backwards with enough abruptness to distract her, but with insufficient violence to alarm her, and with a flash of doubt and fear that a sudden siren call of inevitability immediately banished, he untucked his shirt and began to unbutton the collar.

'What – what the _fuck_ are you doing?' Arya demanded shrilly.

He didn't answer, and with one practised motion, pulled the garment over his head and watched as his scarred torso met the girl's eyes; the legacy of his thirty days and nights as the guest of the Targaryens' torture detachment. Arya's grey eyes streamed with horror and disbelief, and travelled slowly over his bare skin like silent hands, and as she coloured, and swallowed audibly, Jaime realised, suddenly, that no one but himself, and the maester who had treated him at the beginning had seen this new half-nakedness of himself; this shell that made it seem as though the barbs and spikes of the iron throne had suddenly bent inwards, and that he, unknowingly sitting on it, had been enfolded and trapped in that ghastly embrace; the swords finding homes in his flesh and tearing carelessly out of him when they had tired of the taste of his blood.

For a moment, her seeing, and his own recklessness, paralysed him with fear. But he watched her face, even as she did not watch his, and when a sudden moisture the colour of rain began to cling to her eyelashes and to turn her cheeks to snow again, he knew that he had won.

He could not rejoice at the fact.

'Do you still think I want a war, Lady Stark?' he asked.

'Turn around,' Arya commanded softly.

Jaime turned.

He could hear fear in her footsteps, and hesitation in her body as she stopped directly behind him and paused; as though she only trusted her eyes to move. He could sense the spectre of that movement lingering vividly in the veiled space between him and her; and he gasped aloud as he felt the warmth of her breath on his skin and the sudden touch of her fingers on his shoulder blade, at the place where a red hot poker had been applied directly to the skin and had made the flesh sizzle like fat in a pan; making it seem that before that day, he had not had the slightest notion of what true pain was; not even when his hand had been taken. It had been the kind of pain that should not exist.

Jaime could hear Arya breathing in and out a symphony as her fingers moved slowly across his back; listening as his ruined skin told her mind its story, and hurting her as she witnessed its unfolding. The feeling of her skin touching his was unearthly. Even the graze of something so insignificant as a fingertip made his pulse rush and beat out, and flounder; and as he stood there, realising, he found that he didn't care a fourpenny fuck if she knew it.

Because he could also feel her blood; he could feel its song in every tiny pinprick of her skin as it met his; and the sensation was like a secret whispered between them in a language that had no sound; only touch.

He turned around. She took a hurried step back; like she was frightened of him. He bent over and picked his shirt up again; pulling it over his head and immediately struggling to find the sleeves as his mind was overtaken by the abrupt and restless desire to cover up the fragments of himself.

Arya helped him; slapping his hand aside when he tried to stop her and making no comment as she unravelled the sleeves and let him pass his arms through them. He stared at her as she wordlessly buttoned up his collar again; her eyes fixed solidly on her own fingers, and not on the lattice of scars still visible beneath them. He smirked.

_It's only natural. I wouldn't want to look at me either._

When she finished, she stepped back again and thrust her hands deep into her pockets; as though hiding them from him, and from herself; fidgeting like an unruly child at lessons.

'The Targaryens did this to you,' she mumbled awkwardly; as though she would have preferred the statement to be a question.

That made him smile gently at her; though he didn't know why.

'They _did_ do this to me,' Jaime replied, 'and quite frankly, I don't care. But your sister made sure that the Targaryens carved my lands up in the same way that they carved up my body. Aegon would never have deployed all three dragons if she had only kept her fucking thoughts to herself. I do not want that to happen again. I do not want a war. I just want to be left alone while I clean up the mess. And I cannot do that if I am saddled with a wife that I detest and the entire future of the kingdoms on my shoulders –'

Jaime bit his tongue and berated himself. He had told her far too much, and with far too much sincerity.

'Then there's the pure and simple fact that I would make Sansa a very bad husband,' he hurriedly added; sealing the weight of his words with his habitual disdain, 'because I don't want to marry her. I simply don't.'

Arya's face was wreathed in a sudden and inexplicable sadness as she looked at him; and her words, when they came, were quiet and desolate:

'Sometimes we cannot always get what we want.'


	7. Chapter 7

'Four hours,' Sansa hissed when Aegon entered her sitting room; the candles guttering as the door closed behind him, 'you are _four hours late._'

'I had a hysterical small council to soothe and rather a lot of damage control to do, my lady,' Aegon told her; his voice mild and unperturbed as he crossed the room to where she sat and stooped to kiss her lips. Sansa pointedly turned her head away from him, and said nothing.

Ser Jaime's open defiance at the tourney had angered her for more reasons than she could count; the most important among them being the humiliation that she had suffered, and her own carelessness in failing to anticipate it. Like some green girl with only a fool's knowledge of the Game, she had grossly underestimated her opponent; taking him for a broken old man too tired and too weak to put up much of a fight; expecting, without a shadow of a doubt, that his dignity would be served up to her on a silver platter within the space of the single tilt that it would take for him to land face down in the dirt. And Aegon had not defended her when the humiliation had occurred; not even glancing in her direction as her husband-to-be had done the chivalric equivalent of telling her to fuck off.

Aegon, observing her coldness, gave a kingly shrug and seated himself opposite her as she continued to glower at him.

'We owe much to Lady Arya's quick thinking,' he said, not appearing to be in any rush to improve her mood, 'had she not decided to so conveniently drop to the floor, the gods only know what would have happened.'

'Indeed,' Sansa testily replied, 'perhaps you would have been required to make a decision for once in your life.'

Aegon stiffened in his seat.

'I must ask you to guard your tongue, my lady.'

'I beg pardon, Your Grace.'

The king was silent. He still wore the black and red doublet that had adorned his person at the joust: the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen picked out in red and gold silk; its hooded eyes as unfeeling and as cold as the magnificent rubies that shone out in their place. The colours made him seem paler than he truly was; his hair falling to his shoulders like the lovechild of moonlight and silver. He was a fool, but at least he was a handsome one. Were he not, she might have died of boredom long ago.

'I'm rather tired of being humiliated in your service, Your Grace,' Sansa declared, 'it was trying enough during the conquest, and it is no less taxing now. What will we do if Ser Jaime tries something like this again?'

'I doubt that he will,' Aegon sighed in exhausted reply, 'his actions are those of a desperate, if spirited man, pretending that there is a way out for him. I just had no idea that his personality was so inclined to the dramatic.'

Sansa chuckled resentfully.

'That's a reproach from you,' she coldly observed, 'after that cheap little stunt in the throne room.'

'Do I detect a hint of anger in your voice?' Aegon pleasantly solicited.

'You are the most perceptive of men,' Sansa replied, with equal insincerity, 'why did you neglect to tell me that the marriage announcement would contain such an element of drama as being threatened at sword point?'

'Surprise was essential, my lady,' the king told her, 'I'm sure you understand.'

'I like other people to be surprised,' Sansa quietly snapped, 'myself; I do not care for it.'

'I understand, I understand,' Aegon replied with magnanimity, 'but notwithstanding your beauty and the greatness of your talent, my lady, Lord Varys and I agreed that had you known about the soldiers beforehand, you might have found it difficult to convey a level of astonishment great enough to place you above suspicion.'

'And knowing about the marriage beforehand might not?' Sansa coldly questioned, 'you make little sense, my king.'

She remembered the moment that the gold cloaks and the black cloaks had drawn their swords in unison; the moment that had possessed her with an irrational and horribly tangible terror that Aegon and Varys had deceived her, and meant to kill her rather than proceed with their understanding. The sound that her father's head had made as it had rolled down the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor had come to her mind; and herself as she had once been: weak, helpless, afraid. She had momentarily felt that terrible fear once more; and the knowledge of it had infuriated her later: the weakness in it, the humanity. It was a fear meant for lesser souls; not for hers; not for the soul of any person with the blood of the First Men running in their veins.

Aegon's face was half-amusement, half-indignation as her thoughts became apparent to him.

'Dear lady, your suspicions are mortifying.'

'Spare me your mortification,' Sansa retorted, 'dealing with the charms of my husband-to-be is quite mortifying enough.'

'Surely you take comfort in the fact that you will not have to deal with them for much longer?' Aegon asked, as though they were debating at philosophy.

'Not nearly as much as you do, my king,' Sansa replied, as though they were debating at life.

Aegon's eyes clouded questioningly at that, and Sansa found her lip curling in contempt. Dragon or falcon, stag or lion, men were all the same. Malleable. Capricious. Transparent.

'Your anxiety to conceal your sentiments is touching, Your Grace,' Sansa scoffed, 'or it would be, were it for my sake rather than your own. But I've seen the way that you look at my little sister –'

'Stop there,' Aegon sharply commanded; a trace of shrillness creeping into his voice.

'Well I _have_ seen it, even if the rest of the world remains in blissful ignorance of the fact,' Sansa triumphantly finished; ignoring him, 'I don't suppose I need to remind Your Grace that it would make you the subject of a great deal of gossip and ridicule were it known that you were in love with one sister while fucking the other.'

'Don't be impertinent,' Aegon replied with dragonfire in his voice, 'we may be in the habit of exchanging certain intimacies, my lady, but that does not change the fact that you are speaking to a king.'

'I believe that I am speaking to a man like any other, with weaknesses, like any other,' Sansa professed, as though nothing were the matter at all, 'but the situation, while entertaining and touchingly universal, is not without its problems. What _will_ you do if my sister falls defending her queen?'

'I demand that you hold your tongue, woman,' Aegon growled; the clouds in his violet eyes beginning to glow with an unholy flame that Sansa recognised all too well.

'And if she survives,' Sansa continued, still feigning indifference, 'how exactly do you plan to go about getting her into your bed?'

'_Hold. Your. Tongue_.'Aegon snarled; the harsh enunciation of the words baring his white teeth and curling his lips back.

_Not long now._

'Will you keep her as a paramour? Dress her in rubies beneath those fetching Kingsguard leathers?'

'_I'm warning you –_'

'Or will you release her from the Kingsguard, lead her to the sept in chains and stick your cock in her before you even say the words?'

Aegon leapt from his seat like a quarrel launched from a crossbow; hurling himself across the room and screaming into Sansa's face as his fingers tightened in a stranglehold around her throat.

'_I have commanded you to hold your tongue_ !' he roared; spraying her with spittle and crushing her breath from her. The world flashed and churned into whiteness and light and choking, even in the seconds it took her to draw her dagger from the folds of her gown and slam it violently against Aegon's throat.

'_Let_…_go of me_,' she rasped.

Aegon continued to tremble against her in wrath; his fingers cloaking her breath in a death shroud, and she pressed the steel down harder; buying her breath back with the threat of his blood, and the calling-up of his true self.

He released her throat. He did not move away from her. She could feel his body unknotting and unravelling as he clawed his way back from the storm that she had sent him to. Aegon's eyes were pale, and terrified, and pleading for deliverance from an enemy that he refused to name, and his hands were framing her face; begging her for forgiveness; for understanding.

'I'm sorry,' Aegon murmured; tears of terror choking his voice, 'Forgive me; I'm sorry; I'm so sorry.'

Sansa kissed him softly and comfortingly, and gently wound her arms around his neck; pulling him closer to her, and cradling his head against her chest.

'It's alright, my love,' she whispered, smirking to herself, 'it's alright.'


	8. Chapter 8

A forest of tents had been set up in the heart of the Kingswood; another detail on the seemingly endless list of details in which this marriage between North and South was to have every particular of the gravity, pomp and ritual of a royal wedding short of putting crowns on the couple's heads. The false Aegon believed that this would convince every man in the realm, from the richest lord to the lowliest serf, that this alliance between Stark and Lannister was a serious matter.

Arya did not quite see how spending five days killing things would convince the realm of anything of the kind, but she was certainly not going to complain about it. At the very moment that she had heard of the hunt (she had been practising at the quintain and pretending it was Ser Jaime's head when the others in the yard had begun to shout about it), she had immediately torn off to Queen Daenerys to ask her permission to participate before Aegon thought to put her on duty again.

Though Arya had found the dragon queen in the clutches of one of the foul moods that inevitably took her each time she had a disagreement with Tyrion about the link between Aegon's longevity and the instability of the political situation, Daenerys' annoyance had turned out to work in favour of Arya's suit rather than against it; and the queen had gladly given her consent on the condition that Arya remove Aegon's head from his 'boneheaded Blackfyre shoulders' and present it to her on her return.

'Do you really mean it, Your Grace?' Arya had eagerly enquired.

Daenerys had smiled at that, and had affectionately touched Arya's cheek with one tiny hand.

'Would that I did.'

That had been disappointing, as had the later announcement that the entire week's killing was to be confined to the area around an impractical kingdom of black and red tents because of Ser Jaime's distaste for hunting hard across country. But neither drawback was sufficient to make Arya take back her request to participate, and Aegon, surprisingly, made no effort to change that; not even on the first morning of the hunt, when Arya, mounted and dressed in brown leather, encountered him and a small army of lords and retainers shortly after entering the woods.

'Lady Arya,' Aegon greeted.

'Your Grace,' Arya replied, making a reverence.

'I had no idea that you were joining us,' the king observed pleasantly, 'do you hunt with us today?'

'No, Your Grace,' Arya remarked, 'I hunt alone today. I am new to the sport, and a lowly woman to boot. I would hate to burden the gentlemen of the court with my inexperience; not to mention my general unsuitability for anything much except shutting up and having babies.'

Aegon laughed in amazement, which naturally compelled his retainers to laugh too.

'Have I said something funny, Your Grace?' Arya demanded; her face turning redder than the king's preposterous crimson riding leathers.

Aegon's face fell.

'Not at all,' he stammered; looking down in embarrassment, then up again as the return of his kingly confidence caused his face to break into a courteously baffled smile, 'you have merely…there is some change in you.'

'Is there?' Arya asked blandly; 'if whatever it is offends Your Grace, I will stop it at once.'

'There is no need at all for that,' Aegon told her, 'you should keep to this new outspokenness. It's most becoming.'

Arya stared at him, and only just remembered to bow her head in acknowledgment as Aegon wished her good hunting and rode off into the woods with his men. She briefly considered what he had said, decided that she did not want to think about it, and cantered off in the opposite direction; to a part of the wood that she sincerely hoped would remain idiot-free for the rest of the day.

The Kingswood reminded her of the surface of a lake during a rainstorm. The air was grey, and without sun, and if she half-closed her eyes and let that half-vision consume her, she might have believed herself in the wolfswood during the long summer; the trees above her mightier than the vault of the greatest sept, and the Northern sky above that like iron: hard and everlasting.

Her memories of the North were beginning to fade now. She had only been a child when she had left it, and a child who had not yet learnt how to see. Every time that she saw a sky of iron grey, the North would be reflected in it for fewer and fewer seconds, before the mist and the greyness would become the suffocating humidity and rain of Braavos; of the hundred islands that had been her home for far longer than the place of her people; her true people. No self-respecting Northerner – or Westerosi, for that matter – would dream of going hunting without a spear. And yet here she was, a daughter of Eddard Stark, mounted and armed with nothing but a bow, a quiver of arrows and two daggers, like some lily-livered Lyseni on a parade ground.

A crunching and crackling of leaves and earth from the depths of the trees before her chased the North from her thoughts, and she drew her bow with a rustle of nothingness; the wind that sent sound in her direction leading the absence of sound back to whatever was thrashing around in the bushes and making a spectacle of itself. It was almost disappointing; finding game so early in the day.

A wild boar piglet emerged from the undergrowth some twenty feet ahead of her; its snout, and all its attention, kept low to the ground as it tottered jauntily about in search of nuts.

As Arya slowly nocked her arrow to the drawstring, she felt something rising in her blood and her heart; something that was her, and that was not her, and that she had scarcely felt at all since the day that the queen had commanded her to become Someone; but that she would always recognise, and that she would always obey whenever she felt the beginnings of its howling within her. It was the feeling of soil, and moisture, and leaves beneath her feet. It was creating life in taking life. It was hunting in a pack with her brothers and her sisters. It was the chase. It was wolf blood.

Quick as a cat, Arya lowered her bow, and whistled.

The boar gave a hair-raising squeal of surprise and charged off into the trees as though all seven hells were at its heels; Arya spurred her horse into a gallop, and charged after it; and somewhere in a corner of her thinking self, she knew that she was being an idiot; that she should probably have waited, and stayed quiet, and killed the thrice-damned thing and gotten out of the way. But a good half of the feeling part of her didn't care if she caught up to her prey or not, because the chase was more important than any of that.

But no boar in existence could outrun a horse, and she caught up to her prey far too soon for the chase to feel like much at all; dispatching the boar with three arrows that pierced its flesh; sending wide, crimson strips of gore splattering onto the animal's hide like mud as it keeled over and lay still like a log rolling down a river bank. Arya dismounted, sat on her haunches beside the boar, and yanked each of her arrows out one by one; her senses prickling as more blood spilled onto the ground and the toes of her boots.

The piercing shriek and the powerful blow to her back that followed came bellowing out of nowhere, and no sooner had she rolled to face her attacker; ripping both her daggers from their sheaths at her waist, that the world capsized in a commotion of green leaves, grey sky and brute strength as she was knocked hard onto her back by an enormous sow, easily five times the size of the small boar she had killed. The beast was heavy, but far faster than its size suggested. It seemed to dance through the arc of her daggers as she tried to thrust them into its flesh; its open mouth revealing large tusks that fastened tightly around Arya's right arm and punctured her skin like carving knives piercing a pin cushion; even as she plunged one dagger into the boar's mouth and used the other to cut its throat; drenching her clothing in its blood and hers.

The screaming, volcanic pain that erupted in her arm as she shoved the corpse away from her almost made her retch. Tears of pain defaced her view of the wood around her, and a boiling, nauseating mist silently and brutally invaded her mind as she sat up, stripped off her doublet and found her shirt drenched in crimson blood that streamed in aching rivers and smoked gruesomely in the cold air. The wound, when she found it beneath the (miraculously intact) sleeve of her shirt, was so utterly inundated by strips of lacerated and rapidly bleeding skin that she could not find the exact place where the boar's tusks had pierced her flesh at all, and her blood once again clouded her vision; turning her skin cold and making her tremble so badly that she was overtaken by the desire to simply fall over and go to sleep.

_Get up_, she told herself, _stand _up.

Her eyes closed, and opened again, and time might have passed, or perhaps it hadn't, and she was wandering alone in the wood without her horse; her belt knotted, with an excruciating tightness, above what she thought was the wound; and she'd somehow managed to put her doublet back on again; the clasps done up to her chin. She screwed up her eyes and tried to remember why, and when, but the pain only seemed to grow worse each time she tried; her blood turning to wine in her veins – _wine, there was a wineskin, a wineskin on my saddle, I tried to drink wine so I wouldn't…but I didn't_ – and she began to cast about her in panic, and she knew that she was looking in the wrong places, the ground, the trees, but she couldn't stop herself – _where's my quiver; my daggers_ – the trees were rearing up around her and turning to people like the pain that was rearing up inside her like a glacier and slowly killing her; she was facing her father from the top of a flight of stairs and trying to stand on one toe – _Syrio says every hurt is a lesson and every lesson makes you better…watching is not seeing, dead girl; the seeing, the true seeing, that is the true heart of swordplay… Arya child, we are done with dancing for the day…what do we say to the god of death…_

She could feel the earth beneath her hands now; one hand curling into it; the other spasming and shrieking and bellowing out in pain, and more blood coming as she continued to put her weight on it when she crawled. She closed her eyes, she could barely see, and closing her eyes seemed somehow to make it better…

'Arya?'

She opened her eyes and looked up; her right arm propping her up; her left twitching and flailing from the pain, and the trees were disappearing, and the people and the voices who had come out of them, the tree voices.

Jaime was standing not five feet away from her with his squire; leaning against his horse and enthusiastically drinking the contents of a wineskin, which he now dropped in astonishment as he took in her appearance.

'Seven hells, _Arya!_'

'It's not my blood, most of it,' Arya mumbled, 'it's some…fucking…'

Jaime darted forward and caught her as she collapsed.

'Don't just stand there, boy!' he barked at his squire, 'take hold of her other arm!'

The pain in her body struck her blind once more as the squire hurriedly obeyed and helped his master to ease her into a sitting position; her head drooping and lolling gracelessly, and eventually coming to rest against Jaime's chest as he shouted for wine; the leather of his doublet feeling cool against her cheek and the blood flow from the wound increasing severely and beautifully when she felt Jaime's body encircling hers like a suit of protective flesh and blood. She felt his fingers put the wineskin to her lips and force her mouth open, and the liquid choked her as she swallowed it and took hold of the skin with her left hand and choked some more; the wine like life in her mouth and her body; clearing her mind; dulling it.

'Let me see,' she heard Jaime snap at her as he prised the wineskin from her hands.

A subsequent yelp of surprise from somewhere to her left told her that he'd thrown it at his squire, and the blood rushed out of her in another great wave as the fingers of Jaime's hand began to deftly undo the clasps of her doublet.

'Do you intend on helping me with this, boy?' Arya heard him ask his squire.

'My lord, I cannot –' the boy stammered, 'it hardly seems proper to –'

'Oh for fuck's sake, have you never seen a woman's throat before?'

'No, my lord.'

That made Arya want to laugh. But her strength was bleeding from her like water bubbling from a spring, and when Jaime slowly peeled the leather of her doublet and the sleeve of her shirt away from her skin; his hands working with a gentleness that she would not have expected from him; the sudden shock of cold air seemed to wed seamlessly to the boiling pain; making it so deep that she could hardly move. She opened her eyes.

'A boar?' Jaime asked.

'Yes,' Arya replied.

'Pain?'

'Minimal.'

'Gods, but you're a stubborn little idiot.'

'Fuck yourself, Jaime.'

'Boy!'

The squire jumped about a foot in the air as Jaime's fingers fastened firmly around the wound.

'Yes, my lord?'

'Ride back to camp and fetch a maester for the Lady Arya.'

'Yes, my lord.'

'Quick about it!'

The squire disappeared from Arya's vision, and with the sound of departing horse hooves, the pain returned; a searing agony caused by nothing more than a few stupid, bleeding lacerations on her arm. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe evenly; to concentrate on the heart of the pain; to be present in it and so defeat it; as she had been taught to do. But she could feel her mouth twitching, and her fingers, and her toes; and she felt weak; so utterly weak and helpless; like the little girl who had been a runaway, and a hostage, and a prisoner; until namelessness and facelessness had freed her. She called out to both of them, and summoned her mask to protect her; to stop her from being that person again. But some parts of her face opened up as others closed; No one fragmenting and dying like a smashed mosaic under the weight of the pain that throbbed appallingly in every part of her body and made her squirm unconsciously in Jaime's arms; as though she were lying on a bed of needles.

'Stop that,' Jaime told her.

'Stop what?' she murmured in response.

'Whatever it is you're trying to do with your face. Stop it.'

Arya glared up at him; fully intending to tell him that she'd do whatever she pleased with her own face. But Jaime's own, when it met her eyes, was so pale that he might have passed for a Northerner, and his voice, when he spoke, was hollow and unsettled; as though he were afraid to speak, but incapable of remaining silent.

'What has happened to you?' Jaime asked softly, 'how did you end up this way?'

She looked away from him, and tried to answer blandly.

'My training –'

'I'm not talking about your training.'

She knew that, and she feared knowing it.

_Tell no one_, her masters had said, _tell no one_, _or it will be the worse for you_.

But she could feel it there: in him, and in her; the thing that had gone away; and she could feel herself as she was now: half Faceless Man, half human, trapped by Daenerys' mercy. And he seemed to understand both of them; even though she had never spoken to him about either. And knowing that didn't hurt.

'When I first became…when I…when I first…when I entered the queen's service,' Arya began – tried to begin, 'it was as a Faceless Man. As No one. My masters sent me to her as a gift –'

'As a _gift?_' Jaime repeated; the concept seeming to horrify him.

'A – a token, if you will,' Arya corrected, 'a sign of support for her cause. She accepted me, but…but that wasn't enough for… she told me that if I was to enter her service, I would have to remember who I was, because her… her _sensibilities_ would not permit her to be guarded by somebody called No one. I agreed, but…I just didn't know that she would devote the next few months to making me remember everything about myself. She thought she could change me back just by talking to me. She wanted to 'save' me.'

Jaime grunted in impatience.

'She got it half-right,' Arya went on, 'and it was an amateurish job to say the least.' "Remember who you are, Arya."

She paused, and remembered.

'I love Daenerys,' she said, 'truly, I do, but…she had no idea that remembering is the single cruellest thing you can ask a Faceless Man to do.'

She looked up at Jaime. His face was asking her why. She felt the sound of his pulse. She felt the grief within it. And she knew that he would understand.

'Shedding every last inch of yourself isn't something you do out of a desire to serve God. Neither is devoting your life to the service of death. Nobody willingly comes to the House of Black and White. We all stumble through its doors…by chance, by accident…and we stay, because we have nowhere else to go. Because we're scared. Because we're all running. From hunger, from heartbreak, from death.…from ourselves if we can't find anything else. When we finally lose ourselves – and we're devastatingly well-trained in losing ourselves – it's almost a relief. A rebirth. Everything that makes you who you are…pain, memory, anger….gone. Nothing exists anymore but you, and the lives you take. It's the most exquisite nothingness; the best escape that exists. And Daenerys, well…her actions took that away. Not completely, but…enough.'

Arya's breath caught in her throat, and her eyes screwed up tightly as another wave of pain took her; her own body so perfectly trained to obey that it rebelled against the desire of her own mouth to open up and speak. She forced herself to continue; the pain blinding her as she felt Jaime's arms tighten around her.

'When I was ten,' she mumbled; her head nestling against his chest, 'I met a Faceless Man…on the road North, and then while I was serving as your father's cupbearer, at Harrenhal.'

'At _Harrenhal_?' Jaime exclaimed.

'Yes,' Arya replied, 'but he didn't know who I was, he…he saved…I wanted to kill him, but I –'

'_You served my father at Harrenhal?_' Jaime repeated in disbelief.

'_Yes,_' Arya repeated back at him, 'terrifying old bastard, too; though I wasn't scared of him.'

'Is that…is that why you –'

'What?'

Jaime paused.

'Is that why you touched my cheek?' he asked eventually, 'on the night that we met?'

'Yes,' Arya stammered, blushing, 'you have the same jaw. But that's besides the point. When I was your father's cupbearer at Harrenhal, this Faceless Man – his name was Jaqen – he offered me… it doesn't matter… but…but he helped me to settle…certain debts –'

'He killed people for you,' Jaime chuckled.

'He killed them for the Red God,' Arya corrected; grateful for the lack of condemnation in his voice, 'I merely had the honour of choosing whom he should offer up in sacrifice.'

'Why you?' Jaime asked.

'I threw an axe at him.'

'And he offered to kill people for you? I like him already.'

'To save his life, stupid. He was locked up in the back of a burning wagon with two other hooligans that it would have been far better to leave to the flames. Three lives – three deaths.'

'I don't understand.'

'Like I said, it doesn't matter. But when our killing was done, and we eventually parted; I to look for my family, he to return to Braavos, he gave me an iron coin, and told me to –'

'Once again, I don't understand.'

'It's our order's universal way of saying 'don't fuck with me.' I never leave my chambers without at least ten of them in my pocket.'

'I can well believe it. Why did you never give one to me?'

'I didn't know what they meant _then_, of course,' Arya mumbled, ignoring him, 'he just gave it to me, and said that if I ever wanted to find him again, and learn to do what he could do, I should give the coin to any man from Braavos and say 'Valar morghulis,' and the coin would lead me to him.'

'And it did?' Jaime asked; the humour gone from his voice.

'And it did,' Arya told him, 'eventually. When I reached the House of Black and White, they told me they had no idea who he was. I entered the guild anyway, of course. I had no choice, and I didn't want one. I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew that it had to be done, even though his not being there when he had said that he would be was…can I have some more wine?'

Jaime passed her the skin. She drank till there was nothing left in it.

'I was eighteen when he came back,' she continued, 'on the point of taking my vows, and of forgetting the few, tiny, insignificant pieces of Arya Stark that still remained to me. For some acolytes, this final stage of the process is easy. For others, it's the hardest thing that they will ever do. Either way, each one of us is guided through it by a member of one of the guild's higher orders. My masters assigned Jaqen to me. The fact that we'd met before wouldn't matter if I planned on taking my vows seriously.'

She swallowed her own words. She tried to fold her arms and hug herself and hide, but the pain shot through her each time she moved; nailing her to herself, and in her mind she began to see the fountain again, the fountain and the half-light of the temple, and the dead around it; the symbol of the Red God's mercy; his mercy to the living who no longer wished to live.

'You don't need to continue,' Jaime whispered; his breath stirring the hair on the top of her head.

'Having met before…it turned out to matter more than anything' she stammered, 'from…from the first second that we saw each other again, we…'

'Arya, you don't have to –'

'We were fucked…we couldn't stop it…not even if we tried…and we didn't try. I sometimes think that was the worst part. He was everything. He showed me everything. He… taught me things. Things about facelessness that no junior guild member should know. The beauty of killing like a ghost; a wraith; a saviour. He told me things about himself that he should have forgotten about years ago. I did the same thing…I told him things that I thought had died.'

_She was walking to the fountain in the temple; not even knowing why she was there; only that she had to be. There hadn't been a ripple on the water, and there had been no corpses beside it that day. Just the one. The only one that mattered._

'It's oddly exhilarating, being fucked and out of your mind,' Arya remarked, beginning to talk faster as the memory caught up with her tongue, 'it makes you feel alive, but it also makes you reckless and stupid. I don't know what we were thinking, or hoping, or imagining, or even what we were doing; fighting all day; fucking all night; playing at being human –'

'You _are _human,' Jaime interrupted.

'I don't know what I thought would happen once I had taken my vows,' Arya continued; her voice growing hoarse, 'I don't know what _he_ thought; I don't know. _I don't know_.'

'You're distressed; you don't need to tell me this –' Jaime whispered.

'There is a fountain at the centre of our temple,' she rushed on, 'one taste of the water guarantees a quick and painless death. People come to us there to pray and to die. One day, I went to see it. I hadn't been there since I was a child novice; there was no reason for me to be there; it wasn't my work anymore; but I knew that I should go; something told me that I should go –'

Her words were scattering like leaves in a hurricane now, and in her mind she was approaching the corpse on the floor; her footsteps agonisingly slow; as though slowness would change the fact; would make it less real for a little bit longer, and Jaime was telling her not to continue and angering her; but her words and the need to say them were smiting his and turning them to nothing.

'I found him on the floor next to the fountain, lying dead on his back with his eyes wide open. His lips were still wet. I sat down next to him. He had hazel eyes. I looked hard at them. Once or twice I thought I saw them moving…or looking at me.'

Her voice sounded like ice in her own ears.

'Our masters had given him a choice, or something that they pretended was a choice. Deny what we had done, and both of us would be executed. Admit it, and they would spare me, and let him kill himself to appease the Faceless God for the violation of the vows he had taken.'

A heat was rising in her eyes, and she fought against it with all of herself; forcing herself to continue; to finish even if the words made her choke to death.

'It was all a lie, of course,' she spat fiercely; her voice breaking as the ice exploded out of it and blinded her, 'it was just some stupid _example_ being made out of him: they were only protecting the _politics _that had made them accept me as an acolyte in the first place. Because our masters wouldn't have executed me if I'd fucked a hundred men in the inner sanctum. They'd been intending to send me to Daenerys, under my true name, for years. They just didn't bother to _tell_ me that – _they didn't even tell Jaqen that_ – before they murdered him, and me –'

The heat in her eyes was becoming moisture now, and transforming into hot, salty drops of summer rain; and she gritted her teeth like a wolf and growled to herself; trying to make them flee from her in fear.

'I didn't take vows,' Arya growled through clenched teeth, 'because they wouldn't let me. They sent me to Daenerys and ordered me not to tell a soul. I didn't. And I didn't take revenge; I didn't make a single one of them pay for what they had done; because I was a Faceless Man in all but fucking name and oath by then. I became No one the moment Jaqen…'

The humiliation of the tears in her eyes was crushing her to death. It thrust knives into each individual pore of her body; twisting her wound, and wringing it out as though it were a wet cloth rather than blood and torn skin. She squeezed her eyes closed until they hurt her; the darkness behind her eyelids turning red from the pain; and a single, horrifying, humiliating tear choked out of her. It felt like wildfire burning her skin.

A whisper of cool air brushed it from her cheek. She opened her eyes. Jaime's fingers were still touching her face. And he was looking silently and unconcernedly at her, as though she hadn't humiliated herself in the worst way possible; as though that single tear hadn't revealed a weakness that she couldn't afford to possess. He did not say a word and he did not let her go; remaining where he was and holding her miserable, aching sack of a body together; his silence more consoling than anything he could have said. He knew about silence, of course. He knew everything that it concealed and everything that it expressed.

She stared up at him through her tears as the fire in her arm surged once more. He stared back at her; and she could see the missing-ness inside him as well; in his pallour and in his eyes that were green and damp and that _knew_ loss instead of presuming to know it. She could see it roaring in him, and hurting him. She saw Jaqen, dead; the hazel eyes that she had loved staring at her; maiming her; and she could see Jaime looking inside her with the same silent, desolate companionship that had both moved and frightened her at that infernal welcoming feast. The vision – the fountain, the eyes, the darkness – was brushed breathlessly away, thread by ghastly thread, as Jaime's fingertips softly combed stray strands of hair away from her face, and he leaned forward and kissed her forehead as though she were some stupid child who had had a nightmare.

He did not move away from her once his lips had touched her forehead. They remained there, frozen against the skin; warming her up and giving her his breath to breathe with. She could feel her hand reaching out, and touching his cheek. Her eyes closed as she listened to him breathing. Then the sound grew louder, and warmer; and her blood blazed within her, and she couldn't breathe, or see, or think; and when she opened her mouth for air, she found his lips instead; by accident; it must have been by accident; and she had no idea whose fault it was, or who had started it, but she did not pull away from him. She couldn't. She didn't want to.

The knowledge, and Jaime's lips, almost burned her alive. He kissed her with an agonising softness; with something that she might have called innocence had she not known better. Her hands travelled slowly through his hair and traced the scars on his face, even as his body grew warmer and harder against her, and when she opened her mouth for his tongue, and tasted it, all thoughts of innocence disappeared.

He tasted of wine, and blood; and the way that he rolled his tongue against hers, and enfolded her, and sent his fingertips gliding up her spine to linger feverishly in the nape of her neck, made her moan aloud, and gasp, and forget the pain in her body. His lips were the sweetest kind of sorcery, and his smell, and the pulse of his blood in his chest, and she could not summon up the slightest trace of the guilt that she was sure she should be feeling, because her mouth being with his mouth, and her body being with his body, did not feel wrong.

They pulled away from each other slowly when the crack of leaves and voices announced that help was nearby. Jaime's fingers locked tightly with Arya's as his squire appeared with the maester and his assistants; the latter grumbling sulkily at the weight of the stretcher that they had had to carry from the camp.

'This _idiot _squire of yours,' the maester cried, clouting the boy soundly over the head, 'has led us on a merry chase across the whole of Westeros, the silly young –'

Arya stopped listening. She felt hands grip her arms and legs and lay her on her back; making her feel cold and sore again. She saw an open medicine case beside her, and more hands plucking milk of the poppy, wormwood, needle and thread from within it. The maester was cutting off her shirt sleeve and tittering about a hunt being no place for a woman. And still Jaime's fingers were laced firmly through hers; gripping her hand; not letting her go.


	9. Chapter 9

Tyrion was woken by the feeling of Dany trembling violently in bed beside him. She had her back to him, and the early morning light scarcely lit up her silhouette; but through the obscurity of the silver dawn he saw her curled up like a dead leaf; her hands covering her mouth and smothering the sound of her own breath.

Tyrion gently put one hand on her shoulder.

'Dany.'

She turned to face him, and her beautiful eyes were lilac with tears.

'Tyrion,' she whimpered softly, 'Tyrion –'

He stared at her for a moment. He couldn't speak. His voice was gone, and his breath with it, because Daenerys almost never cried; not even in private. She did not grant herself the right to. _'I cannot cry, and be a queen.'_

He pulled her softly to his chest and held her there. It was like holding a frightened child. Her fingers traced frenetic circles on his chest, and her limbs were taut as bowstrings; nightmare still piercing her skin and filling up her lungs. Tyrion kissed her forehead and stroked her hair; his fingers looking as clumsy and ridiculous against the molten silver tresses as those of a child playing unsupervised with his mother's jewellery. His instincts were telling him to say something to her despite what he knew to be her own wishes, but all that came to mind was some ill-conceived (if typical) jape about a deformed demon monkey standing loyally at hand to personally remove the balls of any person that tried to hurt her.

_Pathetic pathetic pathetic. _

'I dreamed of Lannisport,' Dany whispered, 'when I first smelled the smoke, and knew. I told myself it must be coming from Casterly Rock. I wanted it to be. But then I looked towards the sea. I saw the smoke. And the screaming started.'

Tyrion remembered everything about that day, but above all else, even above the fall of Casterly Rock, he remembered her.

_'I want it stopped_,' she had shouted at Aegon when Lannisport had begun to burn and scream in the distance; raped and destroyed by Lady Sansa's armies, '_I want it stopped!_'

But Aegon had not heeded her, or summoned Sansa to answer for disobeying his orders that Lannisport be spared, and thousands of women and children had died only hours after their men had burned to death. Dany had stood motionless for hours in her black and red Targaryen armour, watching the smoke rise; unable to hold her tears back and snapping at every person that acknowledged them. Her hair had hung loose and undressed about her shoulders; as though she were a woman in mourning, but she had not granted herself the right to cry. _'I cannot cry, and be a queen.'_

'Everything's wrong,' Dany murmured; her voice like a hole in the earth, 'isn't it? The day I married Aegon, everything went wrong. I did it to _avoid_ killing innocents. Now I begin to think that…less blood might have been spilled had I simply sent Arya after him and taken his men.'

'They wouldn't have come,' Tyrion whispered.

'I did not want Lannisport to be…I did not want…my coming was not meant to end in this way. Not like this…there was too much blood at the beginning…too much pain. What we did to your homeland…to your brother – it was –'

'Jaime deserved every minute of the pain you inflicted on him, trust me,' Tyrion grunted; remembering the screams, and the refusals, _let me speak to him, just let me talk to him for five minutes…_

'Tyrion,' Dany murmured; her voice growing in strength, 'you don't mean that –'

'I _do_ mean it,' Tyrion growled; glaring at her and her sad, glorious, uncomprehending eyes.

'Tysha was not –'

'I don't want to talk about Tysha.'

Dany fell sharply and abruptly silent, and said nothing for some time; her hand creeping into his, and holding it hard when he did not pull away. He wound his fingers through hers and kissed them.

'Have you spoken to him?' Dany asked, 'since your return?'

'No,' Tyrion grunted; marvelling, for the thousandth time, at her constant desire to save all the world regardless of her own feelings towards them, 'I've been far too busy wiping my arse with the contents of my desk.'

'Tyrion,' she retorted.

'Don't 'Tyrion' me, Daenerys,' he snapped wearily.

'It's his wedding today,' she pressed on, 'there shouldn't be strife between you.'

Tyrion gave her a withered look.

'It's a wedding, not a funeral. Well –'

'It is a heavy burden that we place on his shoulders,' Dany persisted, choosing to ignore the most important part of his previous comment, 'he won't be able to do it alone.'

'He won't have to,' Tyrion droned, irritated by her persistence, 'I'm supremely confident that he and Lady Sansa will have murdered each other before the week is out. We should prepare the city for war at once. I wonder if confetti can be used to soak up blood.'

'I thank you for your confidence in our ability to rule, my lord,' Dany growled; glaring at him as anger began to colour her voice.

'_Our _ability to rule?' Tyrion repeated theatrically, 'I was under the impression that you wanted Aegon dead.'

'So do you.'

'Yes, only I'm smarter about it.'

Dany's eyes flashed black, and indigo. She shoved Tyrion away from her, ripped the covers off and got out of bed; almost tearing her bed robe in half as she draped it around her shoulders and began to pace the room in rage; her eyes blazing and looking for something to throw.

'Have I offended you?' Tyrion drawled, looking about for wine, 'I meant it as a joke.'

'I doubt you'd be so inclined to jest if you were the one who had to bow, scrape and be fucked day after day!' Dany spat.

'Watching it happen to you is hardly pleasant, believe me!' Tyrion shot back; rising and beginning to dress.

'But joking about it _is_?' Dany raged.

'It is too soon for him to die!' Tyrion exclaimed; sick to death of this having this argument, and wondering if she understood him at all, 'if he dies so soon after your marriage, all anyone will see is another king in a long line of kings that have conveniently dropped like flies. Everyone would know it was you, and you would be neither feared, nor respected, nor loved for it. Everything that the conquest achieved – gone! It would make the monarchy as fragile, as disrespected and as pitiful as it was during the war years. It would _show people_ that three dragons are poor weapons against poison, or a knife in the dark – '

'They _are, _Tyrion!' Dany interrupted.

'True, but do you really want the entire realm to know that?' Tyrion agreed, losing his temper, '_do you_? You make me wonder how in seven hells you didn't get yourself killed when I was away!'

'My existence depends on _you_, does it?' Dany shouted.

'You know perfectly well I don't think that!' Tyrion shouted back.

'On spreading my legs and keeping my mouth shut until you say otherwise?'

'_You agreed to this!_ It's a little late to start complaining about it now!'

He regretted the words the moment he spoke them. They made him feel like his father. And Dany was glaring at him in utter fury; seeing him for the cunt that he was.

'_What did you say?_'

'Forgive me; I spoke without thinking –'

'Did you?'

'Dany, please –'

'I am your queen and the blood of the dragon, not some painted whore!'

'I have _never _called you a whore!'

'That hasn't stopped you treating me like one!'

'I've done nothing of the sort, believe me!'

'Only you would know!'

'True enough!'

He immediately regretted saying that too. But it was too late. They were standing in silence, half-dressed and glaring cruelly at each other, and in Daenerys' rage Tyrion saw her as he had dreamed of her every night during that entire year in Braavos; as he knew she would be if she ever learned of the drinking and the whoring that he had reverted to during his time away from her; the comforting debauchery that he had lived in for most of his life, and that he had promised her was over. He could see the accusation in the way that she looked at him, and it made him angry rather than regretful: angry at himself for being such a stupid, weak fool; angry at her for imagining that he would ever mention her in the same breath as the women that _made _him such a stupid, weak fool…and angry at Varys. Because he had told her. There was no other way that she could have discovered it.

_You have nobody to blame but yourself, you fool. No one but yourself._

Tyrion walked to the nightstand beside the bed, bowed and quietly left through the secret passage; all without looking at her; all without speaking. Dany made no attempt to stop him, and he stumbled back to his chambers in the dark; imagining his fingers as they tightened around the eunuch's neck.

* * *

Her corset laced up, and her hair dressed, Sansa sent her ladies away and sat alone before her looking glass. Her wedding dress hung by the window, spirit-like against the red sandstone of her bedchamber; cloth of silver woven with black pearls; turquoise silk worked into the dagged sleeves; excess upon excess; the South and all that she hated about it. Aegon had insisted on it, and she had obeyed him. A rare occurrence. Obeying the king at all was something that she only did grudgingly. When she had no choice. When it was necessary.

A sudden tactless rustling behind her made her whirl around in alarm; her heart thundering and her hand darting across the table for her dagger. But it was only her sister; leaning sheepishly against the wall, wearing those dreadful white leathers, and looking rather gaunter than was healthy. Sansa had not heard her enter the room at all. Perhaps it was a trick that she had learned at Faceless Men school; far away and safe across the Narrow Sea, when real people were fighting the real war: the war for the North.

'Sansa,' Arya greeted hesitantly.

'Sister,' Sansa coldly acknowledged; remembering the tourney.

'I'm sorry I haven't come to see you before now,' Arya said, 'I was afraid.'

Sansa had also been afraid, though she would never say so; declaring to all and sundry that she had come to court to see her little sister, only to change her mind each time she found her feet turning in the direction of the white sword tower. A rare carelessness on her part. A rare weakness.

'I heard that you had a run-in with a pig,' Sansa half-sang, half-smirked, 'do the Faceless Men not teach their initiates to deal with that sort of thing?'

'No,' Arya mumbled; blushing in embarrassment.

'Not even to practice on?' Sansa enquired; her voice dripping with sarcasm.

'No,' Arya insisted, 'we practice on humans.'

When Sansa snorted disdainfully in reply, Arya fell silent, and the anger, surprise, and hurt on her face were sufficient to make Sansa hesitate. She had only seen Arya from a distance since her return from Braavos, but Sansa had always been close enough to observe, and then to mock at the almost alarming coldness and reserve of Arya's demeanour; at the fire that had gone out; the fire that Sansa had hated as a child; calling it uncouth, unladylike and barbaric. Until she had discovered it within herself, and seeing her sister without it had become almost unbearable.

But today she could see it burning bright in Arya's eyes again; raw and unchannelled and unstoppable, and the rush of emotion that she felt; the weakness that she felt at the realisation…

'You practice on humans, do you?' Sansa repeated; the ridicule not leaving her voice, 'and that left you so ill-prepared for the task of hunting pigs that it took one pig to save you from another?'

'If Ser Jaime were a pig, he would have let me bleed to death,' Arya told her; as though she were discussing the weather.

'Nevertheless,' Sansa snapped, 'it seems a rather tame thing to call a child killer.'

Arya shrugged in response and winced in pain; the fingers of her left hand twitching as they fought the involuntary urge to move to her arm. As she watched her, Sansa felt the howling void in the pit of her stomach that had also come to her a fortnight ago, when she had heard the story of how her sister had been the first of the hunters to take up residence in the maester's tent after Ser Jaime had found her covered in blood, in a state of near-madness and missing most of her upper arm after some fuck-up involving a boar. Enquiries made of her own spies soon assured her that it was nothing more than a bad bite, and that Arya's good health and compulsive inability to be a good patient had left the maesters confident of a full recovery.

Many times Sansa had found herself on the point of having her horse saddled and riding out to the Kingswood herself. She had refrained from doing so just as many times. Her own initial panic had frightened her by virtue of its resemblance to the fear that seized her whenever she thought of her son in harm, and she could not afford to be compromised by such feelings now. It was only wise to distance herself from her sister, especially now, especially if tonight went ahead without Aegon or Varys managing to stab her in the back. But looking at Arya – her face like their father's, her hair worn like their mother's, and the return of the iron within…

'How is your arm?' Sansa asked; her tone somewhat kinder.

'Fine,' Arya mumbled grumpily.

'Don't lie,' Sansa remarked.

'I'm not lying,' Arya persisted.

'Why aren't you in armour, then?'

'It's not my fault! Ser Barristan won't let me go on duty again until it's completely healed. What's the point of that? I didn't hurt my shoulder; I didn't break my leg; I'm not even right handed!'

'If you're not on duty, you should be wearing a gown, then.'

'No, I shouldn't.'

'Yes, you should.'

'_No, I shouldn't!_'

'It's only ladylike, Arya!'

'I'm not a stupid lady!'

'Shut up!'

'_You_ shut up!'

'No, _you_ –'

Both stopped; both realised; and Arya smiled, then Sansa. The past seemed to rise between them like a bridge; making them who they had been, and who they were, and Sansa remembered Winterfell, and being part of a pack; the days when she and Arya would have clawed each other's eyes out twenty times a day if left to their own devices; unconscious and uncaring that their lives would never be so simple, or so happy, again.

Sansa went to her sister and embraced her. It was the first time that she had ever done so without squirming or wrinkling her nose. She felt Arya's hands winding hesitantly around her waist; as though she were afraid of being touched, and Sansa realised with discomfort that her sister had no smell; not even of sweat or old leather. It was like hugging a ghost.

'I'm sorry that I can't be a real sister to you today,' Arya told her, 'and that I couldn't be there for all the other times, to brush your hair and help you into your gown, and other…stuff. I don't know about any of it.'

'I don't need you to brush my hair or help me into my gown,' Sansa replied; the depth and abruptness of her emotion and honesty both surprising and frightening her, 'you're my blood. You're all I have left.'

Arya did not reply. Or perhaps she could not.

When they broke apart, they stood looking awkwardly at each other; the lingering pieces of a circle that could not be completed until they both died: the same blood; the same circle; and yet, strangers. And suddenly Sansa wanted to know everything about her sister, and she wanted to tell her sister everything about her.

_I can't. It's too late. It's too fucking late._

'I'm not _all _that you have left,' Arya said suddenly, 'I hear I have a nephew.'

'Yes,' Sansa nodded, smiling, and ignoring everything that her common sense was telling her.

'How old is he?' Arya asked, smiling back; the grin seeming strange on her face.

'Remind me which arm you hurt,' Sansa commanded.

'The… right one,' Arya replied, clearly baffled by the non-sequitur as Sansa took her left arm and led her to the window seat.

'My boy is eight,' Sansa said proudly as they sat down, Arya's smile warming her more than she would have…'he has blue eyes like his father's, and the most ridiculously red hair that could be conceived of. He's small for his age, but fierce, and stubborn as a mule.'

'A true Stark, then,' Arya grinned.

'He is, may the gods help me,' Sansa beamed, 'the master at arms says he might have been born with a sword in his hand. Each time he falls, he gets up again and carries on; even if he's bruised and bleeding.'

'What name have you given him?'

'Eddard.'

Arya's eyes filled with tears, even as Sansa's did, and when her sister's fingers laced tightly through her own, Sansa did not pull away. She could see their father on the floor before them; his body lolling grotesquely as the Kingsguard leapt forward to retrieve his head before the crowd tore it to shreds. As a girl, she had fainted at the sight. She would never do that again. Never.

'This marriage will mean being separated from my son,' Sansa murmured; her heart heavy, 'I shall have to go to Casterly Rock, no doubt, and…'

'– there must always be a Stark in Winterfell,' Arya finished.

'A Hardyng, in this case,' Sansa corrected testily, 'I have applied to the king to have his name changed; so that our line may continue. He refused me.'

'He's always been a cunt,' Arya growled.

'An inexperienced fool, but hardly a cunt,' Sansa observed, surprised at her sister's rancour, 'he may be a great king someday.'

'He needs to be a great king _now_,' Arya stated firmly.

_How perceptive she is, _Sansa thought,_ perhaps I might…_

_No. Too late. Too fucking late._

_There is no guarantee that she can be trusted, no guarantee that – _

'I pray you will excuse me, sister,' Sansa said; trying hard to make her tone as cold as possible, 'my ladies will return soon, whereupon they will attempt to lace me into that monstrosity.'

Arya looked at the wedding gown and pulled a face; showing no sign that her sister's abrupt dismissiveness had wounded her.

'I understand completely,' she said, getting to her feet, 'speaking to you has been…well…'

Sansa nodded regally in response, and watched as her sister crossed the room and closed the door behind her.

As the silence rushed in to fill the void, Sansa raised one hand and rang the bell for wine; determined to forget that this conversation had ever taken place.


	10. Chapter 10

Jaime had spent most of the wedding ceremony gazing at the coloured glass and seven-pointed stars above his head and wishing that he were in his chambers, asleep and undreaming. All night he had dreamt of Brienne; watched her as she disappeared behind a wall of men, and sent corpses flying away from her as though their deaths no longer required them to return to earth. There had been pain, then darkness, then light, then more pain, and his knees sore and bloody, and the Brotherhood silent (he might have preferred it if they had laughed) as Brienne's head was taken from her shoulders. _'Taken.'_ Some fool of a butcher who had never held a sword in his life had been elected executioner. It had taken him four swings to get the fucking job done.

But this time, unlike all the other times that he had dreamt of that day, it hadn't been _her_ head that they had dangled in front of him, but Arya's; cut from Brienne's body, and still alive, and speaking to him as blood dripped from sliced and torn and severed skin: 'it's not my blood,' she said.

He had felt his mind attempting to push through the borders of his dreamworld and to take him to the Kingswood a fortnight ago, and to everything that he had felt there. But sleep had only let him see the very end of that day, when he had helped the maester's assistants to get Arya onto the stretcher. Her hand had still been clutched in his, cold and sweating, and she had screamed in pain when they had lifted her, and she had not let his hand go. And as they had set her down, she had whispered in his ear 'Keep the peace.'

He had wanted to snap her neck then and there out of pure rage and disbelief that she had not changed in her opinion of this…_ridiculous _plan for peace. And rage and disbelief, when wedded to his fucking memory of every fucking moment that he had spent with her, had soon transformed into panic at having been so stupid. He had let her…he had shown her…seven fucking hells, he had actually _shown her_ what used to be his skin, before the Targaryens had decided to use it for fucking target practice, _he had actually shown her…_and still she could…_you trusting bloody _fool, _what were you thinking.._.

And then, to add insult to injury, she had kissed him: without apologising, without blushing, without caring. And then, 'keep the peace?' What the fuck did that mean? _Why kiss me in the first place if she wanted me to 'keep the peace?' _Why? Why not push him away from her the moment it had started; why not have an attack of righteousness when she had heard the maester coming, instead of pulling her lips slowly away from his for what had felt like an eternity; inch by unhurried inch of skin; evading, delaying, prolonging, and almost making him love her in that moment; for her passion; for her guiltlessness?

_So why tell me to keep the fucking peace?_

It hadn't taken him long to realise why, of course. She had been badly hurt, and delirious, and afraid, and vulnerable; and even more so after rasping out the story of what those fucking Faceless shits had done to her. She had been so emotional after that that Jaime felt sure that she would have kissed anyone that had had happened to be there, if it would only bring her some semblance of relief.

_She kissed me because I was there._

Realising that had seemed far worse in the dream than it had in reality, but still, he had dreamed on; his mind refusing to release him. The maester's assistants had lifted the stretcher; Arya's hand had been yanked roughly out of his, and Jaime had shrugged quietly to himself and wondered if the little bitch was in the right after all.

_Why not 'keep the peace?' I'm obviously such an infernal idiot that my choice of wife is not likely to make much difference to me. So why not choose a woman that makes some difference to the realm? At least I will have done something right – or tried to._

By that time, it had felt as though he had been dreaming about death, daftness, decapitation and bloodied women for days and days, and he had wanted to wake up, or at least to dream of something else. But silk had turned to steel and locked him out of waking and dreaming, and he had been sent to the beginning again; to the nightmare; to Brienne; to the Brotherhood. And when he had started awake on the morning of his wedding; his dreams still clouding his vision like fever, he had realised that if the stupid, stubborn, blockheaded wench had still been alive, she would have wedded and bedded whomever the king had consigned her to if it had meant the slightest possibility of peace; and that if she had been here, with him, she would have caved his head in with something heavy and metallic and very likely unpleasant for refusing to do his duty. She was precisely that sort of imbecile. The same sort of imbecile as him, only uglier, and prouder to admit her own stupidity.

_If she were here with me, _she _would be my wife, and this entire mess would never have happened. I would probably have asked at some point. I would have._

But she wasn't here, she wasn't his wife, and he hadn't asked. So he had gone to the sept, and been wed, and the gods had smiled on him by ensuring that he had felt nothing during the entire course of the ceremony and paid almost no attention to what was happening around him and noted, with neither pleasure nor chagrin, that the tension in the sept had not changed at all; and that North and South were still glaring at each other as though they would prefer to face hellfire rather than reconciliation.

Night had fallen now, and Jaime was loitering in some ridiculous cloistered garden, drinking from one bottle of wine, gazing at the strands of moonlight that danced in the depths of the one that he intended to drink next, and listening to the sound of laughter, music and wedding guests getting drunk in the great hall. He was far enough away from the celebrations to avoid throwing up in sheer revulsion, and close enough to know when he would have to make an appearance again. He had already had more to drink than was wise, and he was now pondering the question of which prospect he found the most unappetising: another night of nightmares, or the idea of fucking Lady Sansa. Perhaps if he smothered her with a pillow and said that he had fucked her to death…

Jaime laughed aloud at the thought, tried to take a swallow of wine, and swore. The bottle was empty. He dropped it, took a thoroughly childish pleasure in the sound it made as it smashed, and reached for the second bottle that he had brought with him out of habit. Tyrion's bottle. _One bottle for him, one for me_,_ and then another, and then another,_ as it always was when they got drunk together. Now Tyrion would sooner drink Manticore venom than do so much as speak to him.

_I can't blame him. I'd have put a sword in his belly had he done to me what I did to him._

As he put the bottle to his lips, and drank; the taste made his heart go black inside him: as black as it had been on the first day of the hunt when he had drunk from the skin handed him by his squire, and seen Arya crawling out of the trees.

The fear that he had felt at the sight of her, looking as though she had been dipped in a vat of blood….he had wrapped himself around her, and her body had been freezing…and the wound…the quantity of blood that she had lost…and yet she had still been capable of speaking; capable of being conscious...the maester had said later that the bite looked worse than it was. Jaime didn't know. Her face had resembled a map: lined on one side, blank on the other; a shield that she had raised and lowered, time and time again. And yet after a while, she had stopped trying, she had given up on guardedness, and told him what the thing was that he had always seen in her; the thing, a thing, one of many things, that made her just like him.

_Much good may it do her._

Jaime forced down another mouthful of wine as he remembered the fury with which she had fought her own tears; as he would have done himself had their positions been reversed, but that he could not find the strength to condone in her. The wine danced softly on his tongue and sent a paralysing weakness into his limbs; as her lips had done, and he had wracked his brains in every moment that she had come into his mind since then – in the split seconds that lingered on the edge of his present desire to slit her throat – trying to remember who had started it, who had moved first, who was responsible, and he could not remember a thing. Only that it had felt good, and that the idea of thinking of another word for it made his head hurt.

A bird perched itself on a rosebush some three feet away from him and began to sing with an air of such decided spite that Jaime had half a mind to throw his dagger at the impudent avian idiot and see how well it could chirrup when speared into the opposite wall. The thought made him listen to the sounds around him for the first time in what felt like hours. What he heard drew him to his feet, and made his blood run cold.

He heard nothing but birdsong. No music, no laughter, no raucous conversation. Only pure and absolute silence: not the serene quietness that descended on a mind transfixed and set aglow by wonder, but the harsh and howling void that tore like wind across the patient, unbloodied space between two warring armies.

_Perhaps Aegon has called for a minute of silence_, Jaime thought with very little hope; his heart beginning to convulse in his chest.

He turned in the direction of the hall and strained his ears. The world was as silent as a crypt. His hand came to rest on his sword. And he realised that the sound he heard was not a minute of silence, but the sound of a thousand people holding their breath.

* * *

The grey Northern lord's dagger had pierced the yellow Southern lord's neck. The Southern lord was rasping like a landed fish; his gasps huge and eternal and louder than the scrape and rattle of wood on stone as guests rose to their feet to watch; some eager, some despairing, some disbelieving, all silent. Every pair of eyes in the hall, save one standing at the back, watched the yellow doublet turn slowly and gradually red, and the Southern lord wearing it tottering, and beginning to fall.

Arya, standing unarmoured behind the queen despite having been commanded off duty, scanned the room for Ser Barristan and Loras; though she knew that they had left the hall to escort Aegon to his chambers only a short while ago. Her eyes shot calmly and systematically from one gap in the crowd to the next and did not find them. She stepped quietly up to Daenerys' side, her hand on her sword, and joined the rest of the hall in watching the yellow Southern lord breathe his last.

He hit the ground; blood spraying the floor around him, and the taut, brittle, dreading silence did not become questioning, or hesitant, or stronger with calls for calm and reason from either North or South. Figures rose up around Arya, and from the tables below and with them the sound of war; and silence was annihilated as hundreds of wilful and eager butchers hurled themselves across the hall like armies to rip flesh from the bones of men and women both; throats gouged out, limbs removed, entrails expelled and heads cut from bodies, all in a matter of seconds counted out in the roaring of curses, war cries and fulfilled vengeance.

Arya pushed Daenerys' chair backwards, onto the floor and out of the line of fire; almost growling aloud in impatience at the resulting cry of pain as she pulled Daenerys roughly out of the chair and onto the ground.

_Honestly._

Then the dagger appeared in her sight, buried up to the hilt in the queen's thigh, and Arya realised, with a sudden, seething understanding, that the weapon's not being similarly buried in Daenerys' throat was only a matter of the unexpected change in position across the few seconds it had taken for the chair to fall.

_Fuck._

Daenerys' face contorted in pain and turned the colour of snow as Arya shielded the queen's body with her own and crouched in front of her like a cat, sword in one hand, dagger in the other, painfully aware of what her present strength and the lack of armour on her back meant for Daenerys' longevity as she faced down the evening's first two idiots; her sword slicing through the ankles of the first fool and her dagger through the balls of the second. The bodies fell bleeding and screaming to the floor, Arya moved once more to her place in front of Daenerys, and a sudden flash of blood-stained white and silver came over the maimed men before her as Ser Barristan and Loras rapidly speared their swords through her assailants' throats.

'What in seven hells have you done to her?' Loras demanded, staring at the queen.

'Pick her up and shut up!' Arya shouted; looking about her and realising that she could not see Sansa.

* * *

'Take the dagger out,' Daenerys commanded through gritted teeth; her voice echoing menacingly off the stone walls of the secret passage, '_take it out!_'

Loras, who had been commanded by Ser Barristan to sit on the floor next to Daenerys and ensure that she did nothing of the sort, graciously presented the half-delirious queen with his deepest regrets that he was unable to obey her.

'If I remove the dagger, Your Grace,' he said, 'you will bleed to death.'

'Far worse will befall _you_ if you do not do as I say, Ser,' Daenerys snapped stubbornly; sweat beading on her forehead as the fever began to take her.

'Explain yourself,' Ser Barristan gruffly demanded of Arya, 'why push her chair over when pulling her out of it would have worked just as well?'

'The dagger would be buried in her throat had I taken that course,' Arya replied quietly, 'which of course is what Aegon wants.'

'Lady _Arya_,' Ser Barristan warned sharply.

'Take it out, _please_,' Daenerys rasped; trying to take hold of the dagger and growling when Loras prevented her.

'There is absolutely no proof that the king was responsible for this,' Ser Barristan continued.

'Then why retire so early?' Arya hissed; wishing for the first time that Daenerys had allowed her to take the Lord Commander into her confidence, 'why retire before midnight on the day the Seven Kingdoms are finally united; on the day he supposedly sees his life's purpose fulfilled? What sort of monarch does that?'

'Careful, little lady,' Ser Barristan snapped, 'what you say is treason.'

'I am a traitor's daughter,' Arya shrugged, 'it must run in the family.'

'_Gods be good, _must I slap you?' Ser Barristan hissed.

'Who guards the king at present, Lord Commander?' Arya asked, with rather more cheek than was respectful.

'Ser Rolly,'Ser Barristan replied; his voice beginning to turn grey with doubt.

'Gods be good,' Loras growled in disbelief.

'Lord Commander, we cannot disregard this!' Arya insisted.

'_I will burn…them…all…_' Daenerys grimaced, '_I will take what is mine…_'

'I will not believe that a son of Rhaegar Targaryen would compromise the unity and peace of his kingdom merely in the name of assassinating his queen,' Ser Barristan declared, 'the notion has no sense in it.'

'_There is perfect sense in it!_' Daenerys growled with a sudden, feverish lucidity; trying to get to her feet and yanking Loras' cloak by means of demanding assistance, 'since the son of Rhaegar Targaryen is lying _dead _with a _crushed skull _in whichever ditch Tywin Lannister tossed him into thirty years ago. Aegon has plunged the entire realm into _anarchy_ for _ambition_…orchestrated a bloodbath…a false dragon who thinks he can slay a true one through _trickery_ and _dishonour_ –'

'Your _Grace_?' Ser Barristan interrupted.

'I will hear no…more…talk…of…_peace and quiet_,' Daenerys spat, 'if my husband wants a war, _he has more than earned one_ –'

'Your Grace, please,' Ser Barristan pleaded, 'you are in no fit state to –'

'_I will decide what state I am in,_' Daenerys snarled; looking like a blood-stained corpse in the darkness, 'we will make for Dragonstone at once…my armies will come to me there…I will call for allegiance across the whole of Westeros, and then I will come back here and rip that fucking impostor's throat out with my own teeth!'

'Your Grace, there is no –'

'_Silence!_'

Ser Barristan fell silent.

'Ser Loras,' Daenerys said, her skin starting to turn grey from shock and her face convulsing from the effort of hiding her pain, 'I shall need you to carry me; we'll move faster that way. We'll take the passage under the serpentine to the Mud Gate; I doubt the fighting has spread that far yet. Ser Barristan, Lady Arya –'

'We will provide cover, Your Grace,' Ser Barristan declared.

Arya, nodding, said nothing; her right arm beginning to throb severely as Loras scooped Daenerys up and began to walk; Ser Barristan guiding their passage from the front and Arya bringing up the rear. The narrow passageway echoed with no other sound but that of their footsteps, and the ghastly, involuntary groans of pain that came bubbling up from Daenerys' throat. The queen's head hung limply back, and her breathing was shallow and cruel. Her earlier outburst had taken strength and reality from her, and in a matter of minutes, she began to whisper deliriously, and her hair to veritably glisten with sweat.

'My children,' she whispered, 'my children – '

Arya looked to Ser Barristan for orders.

'_No_, Arya,' the old knight said pointedly.

'My children…' Daenerys whispered again, beginning to struggle in Loras' arms, 'where are they; I want them –'

The whispers soon became cries, then piercing screams as the idea of leaving the dragons behind penetrated Daenerys' blood-clouded mind, and she began to thrash about and fight as both Loras and Ser Barristan attempted to restrain her and reason with her and prevent their voices being heard by any passing little birds. But the dragons had become the only thought in her head, and the thought renewed her strength.

'I cannot leave without my children; _let go of me_, if I leave them behind _he'll_ have them; I'd rather see them dead; I'd rather be _dead_ – '

'Your Grace, _please_,' Loras pleaded; trying to stop her from kicking as her bleeding worsened; her struggling dislodging the blade and cutting deeper.

'_Put me down, make yourself useful and find Tyrion!_' Daenerys half-screamed, half-begged, 'he'll know what to do; he'll find a way; I know he will; he'd never ask me to leave them; he'll find a way – '

In a corner of Arya's mind, she thought that she ought to be doing something to help: seizing an arm, clapping a hand over Daenerys' mouth, knocking her unconscious, trying to think of the last time she had seen Tyrion; whom she cared for, but whom she had not sworn to protect with her life. But in that moment she felt Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion in the earth beneath her feet and imagined them bound to Aegon. She remembered what Aegon had used them to do; Casterly Rock; Lannisport after the sack; survivors exterminated in their homes with dragonfire; the screams, because Jaime had refused to swear allegiance; refused to succumb quietly to what had already happened –

_Oh gods. Jaime._

'Seven gods, where's Tyrion?' Daenerys was screaming; her delirium escalating to full-on hysteria as the full implications of the dwarf's absence became clear to her, 'what have they done with Tyrion; why isn't he here; take your hands _off _me; Tyrion…TYRION!'

Arya ran.

She could hear Ser Barristan and Loras shouting after her as she hurtled back the way they had come. She could feel blood soaking into her shirt sleeve from where her stitches were no doubt coming undone, and the pain coming with it. But the heart in her chest no longer pumped ice. She had a name, she had a face, and when she flung open the hidden door, she entered the light without hesitation.


	11. Chapter 11

'Fuck!'

Jaime spat out another ten obscenities before slamming Tyrion's chamber door shut and cursing his lying bastard of a brother for being four feet tall and impossible to find; and without warning, the entire, endlessly long corridor in the Tower of the Hand began to shake as though heaven and earth were being rent asunder. A thundering, powerful, harrowing screech pierced the air and crashed into Jaime's mind like a tidal wave of grief and horror, and he was flung off his feet and into the opposite wall as every window around him smashed. He felt shards of glass hitting his face; some cutting him; some glancing off him like raindrops. And he heard that infernal cry on the air once again and could not allow himself to contemplate what it might mean; but he leapt to his feet nonetheless, blood streaming down his face, and went to a window, a window frame, and he saw them, all three of them, huge, infernal shadows against the stars; circling, then diving, then opening their jaws.

Mountains of fire were exploding from the mouths of the dragons and roaring into the walls of the Red Keep like missiles. Glass no longer exploded, glass melted, and turrets and battlements and the white sword tower and the entire west wing were burning and collapsing; and suddenly the hordes of Northerners roaming the halls screaming 'Justice for the Starks' and the fact, not lost upon him, that every troop of black cloaks he had met that night had tried to kill him, no longer mattered; only the memory and the boiling rage of Casterly Rock and Lannisport and what those fucking dragons had done.

A chorus of laughs and roars and shouts made him step back from the window into the path of the group of black cloaks that were rounding the corner at the far end of the corridor, and as another shriek sounded from the beasts in the sky above them, Jaime drew his sword and faced them down; not caring how many of the fuckers there were and determined to drag as many of them down to hell with him as he could.

'Come at me, you cunts!' he roared.

The men obliged him; the dragons on their breastplates glinting coldly; and the sight made him grip his sword harder and grin at the thought of the blood inside them. But they were freezing suddenly in their tracks, abruptly and in unison, and crying gruesomely out as though they had all been felled by the same great, unseen blade, and crumpling to the floor and hitting the floor and dying; and Arya was standing behind them; her left hand flung out in front of her as though she'd just thrown a dagger.

Jaime was thrown off his feet and landed hard on his back as the corridor was gripped by another spontaneous earthquake; the child of dragon screams, or the collapse of the halls around them. He tried to rise, and couldn't; the pain in his back turning his bones to powder. Arya appeared half-upside down in his vision; ignoring both him and the dust raining down on her head, and crouching down beside one of the corpses; dagger at the ready. The image of her swam as Jaime blinked and fought and called the pain into himself, and she was wearing a brown leather belt that he'd never seen before; extending diagonally across her body from her right shoulder to her left hip, and decorated with a dozen battle scenes imprisoned one below the other in embroidered frames no larger than tinder boxes. The tinder boxes soon turned out to be compartments for the storage of the gods only knew what, and Jaime stared silently as Arya wordlessly began to dig…something…out of the spine of each corpse and deposit it in the top compartment of her belt; each something still covered in blood and gore.

She remained at work when the air once again filled with the shouts of men at arms, and Jaime had scarcely wondered where the fuck these people found the energy to climb all the stairs in the Tower of the Hand when there must have been easier killing to be found elsewhere, when another group of black cloaks appeared, and Arya kept butchering the corpse she was occupied with as though nothing in the world was the matter.

'ARYA!' Jaime shouted; almost screaming aloud at the pain as he tried to sit up, and she rose with an eerie kind of calm; her dagger still clutched in her hand, and stood quiet as stone as she watched the men in black and red, and waited for them to come to her.

Her speed was incredible. He could see every muscle in her body twisting and stretching taunt and filling up each thrust she made with the might of her entire body and mind working together in the power of a single, diminutive point of the blade that she held in her hand. She moved from man to man like a wraith; her form blurring as her dagger, her true hand, jabbed tiny, identical, deadly holes in the throat of one man, in the inner arm of the next, in the wrist of the one after that; and life would shoot from each man in crimson fountains and jets of blood that made each of them fall rapidly to earth like sacks of meat; murdered by the strength of their own heartbeat. It was the kind of game that had no time for second thoughts, or maiming, or chivalry, or tourneys, or legendary duels that lasted for days. It was designed only for death; for killing and killing quickly, and she was death's pale and beautiful child in Kingsguard leathers, who danced through airborne drops of blood, faster even than them; her work cold, methodical, alien, glorious. As the last man fell to earth, she inexplicably knelt beside her victim and plunged her dagger into his throat a second time; and at the death rattle of his breath her eyes flashed upwards to Jaime's like the glint of sunlight on Valyrian steel, and in them he saw the fire that he had been searching for in the seemingly glacial way that she ended life. It was a fierce joy that he knew; that he lived for, and he could see it burning bright in her and parting her lips and making her breathe deeper as she slowly pulled her dagger from the corpse.

The floor rattled once again, and the night sky screamed with dragonfire, and Arya was sheathing her dagger and glancing in horror at the shattered windows; then back at him.

'Can you stand?' she asked.

'Of course I can stand!' Jaime snapped.

She didn't even stay to watch him do it; leaping to her feet as he painfully rose to his, and dashing to a window frame. The largest of the dragons was circling, and preparing to attack once again, and as Jaime joined Arya at the window and observed the tightness in her lips and suppressed remorse pulsing in her throat, he asked her, though he already knew the answer:

'How did they get out?'

'I let them out,' she replied without hesitation; her eyes still fixed on the dragon.

Jaime stared at her in disbelief and did not even try to conceal his fury.

'Why the fuck would you –'

She turned to face him; her fury matching his.

'If you think for one second that I would let that little shit Aegon have them –'

'_Are you completely mad?_'

'Fuck yourself, Jaime!'

'_Do you have any idea what you've done?_'

'No, I'm blind, deaf and stupid!'

'I couldn't agree more!'

The dragon attacked; the fire dislodging and melting stone far closer to the Tower of the Hand than was comfortable, and tremours once again began to shake the corridor around them and dislodge red dust from the ceiling that plummeted down onto the pool of corpses and covered them like earth.

Jaime blinked as another screech of triumph rent the air, and Casterly Rock was burning around him and turning him cold each time he closed his eyes; making him angrier at himself and far angrier at her.

'I didn't _know _that they would do this!' Arya was protesting hotly.

'You decide to loose three fucking dragons into the largest city in Westeros _and it doesn't occur to you that they might start burning things down?_' Jaime shouted at her, '_are you fucking insane?_'

'Thousands more people would have died if I had left them where they were!' Arya yelled in reply.

'Bullshit!' Jaime spat.

'I did _what needed to be done!_' Arya shouted; a kind of cruelty creeping into her voice that Jaime suspected was intended for herself as much as for him, '_and I don't give a fuck if you don't understand why!_'

That statement reminded him far too much of himself for his liking – particularly the blatant untruth of the last part – and ignoring it; he continued to make furious enquiries as to the state of her mental health.

'Since we're on the subject of insanity,' Jaime said, 'what are you doing up here in the first place? Shouldn't you be in a secret passageway somewhere; helping those silver-haired shits run for their miserable lives?'

'Why aren't you running for _your _miserable life?' Arya scoffed.

'I had to know that my brother hadn't been burned to a crisp!' Jaime barked.

'_So did I!_' Arya shouted; the fingers of her left hand beginning to twitch uncontrollably.

That made Jaime pause.

_She's lying. At least partially._

_No matter. So was I._

Arya was trying very hard to stare out of the window and appear absorbed.

'Is – is he here?' she asked; cocking her head towards Tyrion's door, 'in his chambers?'

'No,' Jaime replied shortly.

There was a slightly awkward silence, and cessation of movement; except for Arya's fingers; which seemed to have acquired a life of their own as they danced like spiders on a sheet of ice. And as the idea of lying once again entered his mind, he began to remember the words that Arya had just spoken to him and not spoken to him, strange words and absences of words that he should have questioned, but that had disappeared beneath anger and amazement as soon as they were spoken, or not spoken: _if you think for one second that I would let that little shit Aegon have them…_the no-answer, the question, with which she had greeted his inquiry about the king and queen that she should now be protecting, instead of standing up here with him watching the world end.

'Arya,' Jaime said, 'where are the king and queen?'

She did not reply for a moment.

'The queen has been injured,' Arya responded, 'Ser Barristan and Loras are seeing her out of the castle. She intends to declare war the moment she can find a pen and paper.'

'_On whom_?' Jaime growled.

Arya did not reply.

Jaime watched her wrestle with the words as they disappeared on the way to her mouth, and he thought. He thought of the mysterious desire each black cloak seemed to have acquired for seeing his head on a spike. He thought of the screeching, triumphant cries: 'Justice for the Starks.' He thought of the talk at the wells that Lady Sansa shared more than just her ideas with King Aegon. And he thought of the thousand contradictory reports he had heard from the countless terrified wedding guests and servants that had crossed his path in the halls: 'the North was offended that the king retired before the bedding,' 'two lords had a quarrel over a courtesan,' 'an assassin tried to kill the queen and missed,' 'Lady Sansa ordered her Northerners to kill every man in the hall,' 'a Northern lord stabbed a Southern lord and war came again.'

_The queen has been injured…_

'Someone wants a war,' Jaime ventured.

'_The king_ wants a war,' Arya corrected.

Jaime cocked an eyebrow at her.

'He'd start a war just to kill the queen? That's rather –'

'Stupid?'

'Or brilliant.'

'What do you mean?'

'Nothing. It's the sort of thing Tyrion would say.'

Arya glanced rapidly out of the window at the flames devouring stone and sky, and then at Jaime. Her eyes were wild.

'We have to find him.'

Jaime nodded.

Arya turned away from him and set off down the corridor without another word; stepping gingerly over the corpses with far more care than any of them deserved. Jaime was about to follow her when the window frames began to shake with more power than ever before, and the screeches of the dragons to seem louder and more terrible. The sensation tore his gaze away from Arya's slowly retreating form; drawing it out of the window and towards the sky, and the black dragon in his sight began to dive downwards, to the right, to the foot of the adjacent wing of the Tower of the Hand, where it opened its jaws and vomited a hurricane of tall, screaming flames through the great iron doors.

They melted.

Jaime watched, mesmerised, disbelieving, as the inferno blasted its way through antechambers and halls and corridors; up flights of stairs and down them; blowing out windows and showering the night air with stars made of half-melted glass. A new serpent, a serpent made of fire, snaked upwards and upwards with an unholy, unquenchable, unstoppable speed, as though every floor in the tower were nothing but a fragile wooden step in a treacherously flammable spiral staircase, and Jaime felt the floor beneath his feet beginning to hiss and crack _seven hells, everything beneath us is burning too_, _the entire tower is burning,_ and as the windows, walls and battlements level with him in the adjacent wing went up in flames; he realised what that meant, and his heart stopped in his chest.

The shock to his body made him jerk away from the window, and turn.

Arya, clearly still determined to find Tyrion despite the chaos, was halfway down the corridor and running; running straight into a place that was empty, and howling, and waiting, and that would soon be smothered and crushed under the weight of fire; and the world around Jaime was plunged into darkness; as dark as it had been the first time that she had run from him; nine years old and wild; a little girl that he had tried to kill because his fucking sister had told him to. He had let her run, all those years ago, but if he let her run now, she would do more than sprain her ankle. She would die.

He had no idea how he reached her in time. He might have shouted…or perhaps he simply ran faster than he had ever run before…or maybe she hadn't been as far away as he had imagined. But whatever he did, however he did it, he could hear the flames tearing through the nearby walls and corridors like paper, with the might, with the power, of an approaching army; and in the split second between seizing Arya's elbow and beginning to run back the way that he had come, the wall of fire came roaring around the corner; its jaws extending from floor to ceiling, and he was yanking Arya around, and running like a madman, and propelling her straight through the door of Tyrion's chambers as though she were a battering ram.

They dashed through the anteroom, the council chamber and the solar; Arya slamming each door shut behind them, though she must have known that it would buy them split seconds at best.

As the sound of fire demolishing the anteroom door ripped through the air, they reached the bedchamber that had once been Father's. Jaime tore across the room to the hearth, reached out for the hidden mechanism and prayed to the Seven that Cersei hadn't somehow convinced herself that sealing the secret passageway after Father's death would discourage defiance.

She hadn't.

Jaime seized Arya by the collar and roughly shoved her through the hole in the fireplace floor; and as he followed suit; almost falling as he slipped down the first rungs of the ladder and released the catch that pulled the entrance closed above him, he observed Arya several feet beneath him; holding onto the ladder with one hand and glaring up at him; her feet dangling precariously into the empty air.

'Next time there just _happens_ to be a twenty foot drop,' she growled, '_tell me first._'

She gained a proper hold and soon disappeared from view; gliding into the darkness beneath him like a sailor descending a rope. Jaime could hear the sound of the dragonfire as it decimated Tyrion's bedchamber, and the threat of it roared above him as he slowly and awkwardly followed Arya down into the black; screaming at himself to hurry up, and expecting, every moment, to feel flames bursting into the space above his head and melting the stone of the entrance; the steel of the ladder; Arya's flesh; his flesh; their bones; and sending both of them crashing and burning to their deaths.

Nothing happened.

He could hear the flames, he could feel their heat on his face, he could smell their destruction, and yet they had no power here; inexplicably kept at bay by one, miserable piece of stone when the entire fucking Red Keep was burning.

_Bloody Targaryens_, Jaime thought; the stench of burning stone hot in his nostrils and the stench of failure black in his mind.

Tyrion was in the castle somewhere; _out there_ somewhere; alive…or turned to ash…_dead, most likely; of course he's fucking dead don't delude yourself don't be a fool he's dead and you didn't save him. Because he wasn't the first person you thought of when you realised what was happening, was he?_

At the bottom of the ladder, when his self-condemnation had reached the point of self-cruelty, he found Arya standing against a wall with a face like horror, and stubborn grey eyes full of tears that she couldn't allow to fall, and he knew that she was thinking the same thing. The shirt-cuff peeping out from beneath the right sleeve of her white leathers was blood red, and a stream of the stuff was leaking gently across her hand, down her index finger and dripping onto the floor. Nothing in her face told him if it was her blood, or someone else's.

Looking above him, to the smell and the heat of the dragonfire, and the sight of the ladder leading from chaos down into darkness; he saw fire glinting in the small dragon sconces above their heads; lighting up stone eyes, jaws, teeth: little infernos that could not destroy; that could hardly maim at all. And he remembered the last and only time that he had come to this place; when it had been so dark that his hand had been invisible before his face, and he had not known if the ladder extended for ten feet, or a hundred; he had not known if he was descending to a single chamber, or to a labyrinth. Then the guards had lit the sconces with torches, and this chamber, at least, had been flooded with light; and Jaime realised that today, now, he shouldn't be able to see at all, because he and Arya had brought no torches with them; because when he had opened the entrance to this place, the world beneath him had been black as pitch.

'I lit the sconces,' Arya mumbled.

Jaime looked at her, then up at the sconces, and down again.

'_How?_' he demanded.

She shrugged, sank to the floor, and didn't reply, and Jaime watched, silent and helpless, as the colour drained from her face and the guilt tore out her tongue.


End file.
